Tomb Raider: Souls of Shadow
by E.P.O
Summary: Fallen from light, reborn in darkness. (COMPLETE)
1. Welcome to Paris

Tomb Raider: Souls of Shadow

_Expelled from Heaven, the Watchers walked amongst men, and upon the Earth bred a curse, an abomination of shadow. –_Enochian Gospels

_In the darkest recess of every human soul slumbers the shadow of evil._ –Werner Von Croy

---

Chapter 1: Welcome to Paris

Lara Croft sat on the filthy backseat of the Parisian taxi, listening to the rain pounding the car roof and watching the seedy district slide by outside. Fat, brown rats scurried around the garbage littering the streets. Windows had been smashed and sloppily replaced with millboard. It was only twenty minutes ago Lara had arrived in the airport and she'd already realized Paris had hit rock bottom since she was last here.

The streets were unusually deserted. The few pedestrians that were there walked swiftly, casting nervous glances over their shoulders. Lara knew what they were afraid of. It was all over the news: "The Monstrum's Dark Rennaisance", "Jack the Ripper reborn," "Police not making any headway, Monstrum still on the loose." A ritualistic serial killer dubbed the Monstrum roamed the city. 16 seemingly unconnected victims had been reported so far, and there were no known survivors. Each body had been desecrated and the blood used to smear unintelligible graffiti and occult-looking symbols all over the crime scenes.

The taxi stopped in front of her destination, the Chantell apartment building on Rue Valise. Lara was relieved to get off the blood- and sperm-stained backseat, but the freezing rain outside wasn't too comfortable either. Her blue jeans and denim jacket were soaked in the blink of an eye. She produced a worn wallet from her old brown backpack, paid the driver and watched the taxi drive off. "_Maybe I should have stayed in that cab and told him to take me back to the airport. Maybe I should just go back to London and forget about Werner,_" she mused.

But Lara knew she would never do that. She had to visit him - Professor and archaeologist Werner Von Croy, her one time mentor. It had been some years since their experiences in Egypt at the turn of the century, but neither of them had forgotten anything and the poignant feelings remained. And yet, they were about to meet again, here in his apartment.

In the cold darkness beneath the Great Pyramid, Lara had promised herself she would never even talk to Von Croy again, let alone help him. The moment she picked up the receiver in London and heard his desperate voice on the other end, she had realized that promise would be broken. He'd rambled about the Monstrum and some paintings he had to find, begging his former protégé to come to Paris and help. Right after the phone call, Lara booked her flight and now she was here on the sidewalk just below his flat. It was one of those moments where you knew things were about to go horribly wrong, but you couldn't do anything to prevent it.

A profound feeling of dread washed over Lara as she stepped inside and walked up the stairwell. The Chantell was one of the few apartment buildings around here that still lacked an elevator. There were no other sounds than her footsteps and the rain's endless drum solo on the window panes.

She finally reached the right floor, walked down a carpeted corridor and stopped in front of the door to Werner's home. "_So, this is it ... I shouldn't have come here. Something terrible's going to happen ..._" Her finger hovered at the button for a moment of petrified procrastination before ringing the bell.

Seconds later, the door swung open and Werner Von Croy appeared. He was 68 years old and didn't look any younger. The little hair he had left was white as a cobweb and his face riddled with wrinkles. He wore a grey shirt, dark green trousers and gold-rimmed glasses. "Lara ..."

"This had better be real good, dragging me all the way from London," Lara said and stepped into the narrow entrance hall. Werner quickly closed the door and secured it with numerous little bolts and locks.

Lara raised an eyebrow. "Afraid of uninvited guests, are we?"

"Y-yes," Werner stuttered, "afraid of one particular uninvited guest."

"The Monstrum."

Werner nodded as they stepped through a doorway to the spacious combined office, kitchen and living room. Hundreds of old-looking books on archaeology and history lined the shelves. The living room was decorated with various plants, African statuettes and paintings from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. A Persian carpet with intricate, colourful patterns lay on the polished floor. The cramped office in the middle had two desks covered with books and faxes. The kitchen on the other side was too far off for Lara to get a good look at. A spiral staircase next to the kitchen led up to the apartment's second floor.

"My, what a fancy place you've got here. How much is the rent?" Lara asked, not really interested.

Werner ignored her question. "Take a seat, Lara. We have to talk."

"I don't want to be here. You've got five minutes. Convince me I'm not wasting my time," Lara said as they sat down in two comfy armchairs in front of an empty, cold fireplace. Through the living room's large round window, she could see the rain pouring down from the black skies, about as fast as the words streaming from Werner's mouth. "Help me, Lara, I need you to get something for me or I'm going to be killed."

"Go on."

"I'm tracking five Obscura Paintings for a client called Eckhardt," he said, leaning forward in his chair, "but he's a psychopath."

"Not my problem," Lara shook her head. "You took the comission and now you're out of your depth. So why should I care?"

"Because I'm being stalked!" Werner abruptly rose from his chair. "I daren't go into the streets," he said, gesturing to the window. "People are dying out there!"

Lara got up from her chair, too. "Handle it, Werner. I had to when you abandoned me in the tombs."

"Lara, please ..." Werner turned around and picked up a crumpled brown card from a table. "Look, go and see this woman, Carvier. She can help." He put the card in her hand and closed her fingers around it.

"Sort out your own mess. I'm going," Lara said and started back towards the entrance hall. "No, wait!" Werner made as if to follow her, but she whirled around and pushed him back down on his chair. Leaning in over him, she let her eyes lock onto his in a glare of pure hatred and vindictiveness.

"Egypt, Werner. You walked away and left me. There was no pity then."

"Get out!" Werner yelled and produced a pistol.

Four gunshots rang out.

Werner gasped as his body was flung through the air and collided with the wall. Blood flowed from his nostrils and mouth. While he heard his ribs snap like fragile branches on an old tree, the pistol flew out of his hand, skidding to a halt under a table. Then, he fell to the floor, dead.

---

Lara awoke with a pounding headache. She stood and scanned the dark living room. It was a real mess, to say the least. Shelves had been knocked down and books were scattered on the floor. Windows were smashed and the rain poured into the room. A table had been cleaved and the armchairs overturned. Paintings had fallen from the wall and now lay on the bloodstained carpet. Crimson graffiti covered the wall to her right, weird symbols daubed all over it with Werner's blood.

And Werner himself lay on the floor with his back to Lara, facing the round window next to the blood-smeared wall. Lara slowly walked through the room towards him, eyes wide with terror. Her legs felt jelly-like, ready to collapse under her there and then. Miracolously, they managed to carry her all the way across the messy room.

Lara crouched down at the limp body and lifted it from the floor. Werner's skin was pale, icy and filled with bruises and wounds. His glasses had fallen off and his glazed eyes glared accusingly at the woman holding him. Lara checked his pulse. Not the slightest beat came under her fingers. She closed his eyelids and gently laid the corpse back on the floor.

As Lara stood, she felt something warm coating her fingers. She slowly raised her hands and gasped when she saw the crimson liquid dripping from them.

Werner's blood.

Lara turned around and staggered away from the dead body, overwhelmed by a sudden dizziness and nausea. She could clearly remember everything that had occurred up to the moment when Werner pulled out a pistol and yelled "Get out!" Then, there was a big black hole of amnesia in her memory, until she'd regained consciousness on the blood-stained apartment floor and found Werner dead. The only thing she could recall during that time was the sound of four gunshots. But who had been shooting? Lara wasn't armed, although she could easily have taken the pistol from Werner and used it against him.

She couldn't remember what had happened, and the possibility remained that she had killed an innocent, defenceless human being. "_But who's painted all the weird symbols on the wall?_" she pondered. "_It could have been the Monstrum ..._"

Shivering uncontrollably, Lara burst into the hallway, walked up to the nearest window and opened it to get some fresh air. The cool night breezes didn't stop the sweat from trickling down her face as she reached out her hands and let the rain wash Werner's blood off.

---

A/N: Of course I don't own "Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness" or any of its characters, they belong to Eidos and Core. I do own this novelization, though ... If you've actually read this far, please leave a review, thanks. -E.P.O.


	2. Manhunt

Chapter 2: Manhunt

Lara's hands were now perfectly clean, but in her conscience-stricken mind they still had Werner Von Croy's blood all over them. She stared out at the dark skies hanging above the city, hypnotized by the rain falling monotonously. "_What's happening to me?_" She sighed and was about to close the window when she heard sirens outside.

She couldn't see the police cars from here – the window only featured a drab view of the ratty alley between the Chantell and a two-star hotel. But it didn't take a deductive genius to figure out what was going on when she heard the main entrance open and several wet boots went tramping up the stairwell. Someone had heard the gunshots and called the cops.

Lara instantaneously realized what she had become: A suspect in the Monstrum case. Wanted by the police. If they caught her, she would have a hard time explaining her presence at the crime scene, and the Parisian police was more than a little eager to get the Monstrum executed. "_But they wouldn't think _I'm_ a serial killer, would they? Lady Lara Croft, the famous British adventurer, an inspiration to people all over the world ..._"

However, Lara had changed recently, and so had people's opinions about her. After she had gone missing, presumed dead, and then suddenly returned from Egypt, things just weren't the same. Her former friends stayed far away from her and she didn't let them get close. "_Lady Lara Croft, the forgotten British recluse, a stranger to people all over the world ... Would anyone really miss me?_"

But what it all boiled down to could be expressed in a single question: Did she want her life to end like this or not?

Four armed policemen came running into the corridor and took aim at their suspect. "The building is surrounded. Give yourself up," they ordered.

"_No._"

Lara easily vaulted over the windowsill. For a splitsecond, she accompanied the raindrops on their swift descent, before grabbing a drainpipe and clutching the slippery surface to slow down. A few metres above the ground, her grip finally weakened enough for gravity to drag her all the way down to the most unforgiving pavement she'd ever encountered. Lara landed on her back in a freezing puddle and was about to stand when a clammy hand reached out and gripped her ankle.

Lara cocked her eye at the owner of the hand. A man in his late sixties lay in a heap of garbage at the alley wall. He wore the same shabby rags he had undoubtedly worn for a number of years now. A dirty, grey beard hung from his pale face and various syringes were scattered around his body. His pupils' diameter measured about one millimeter. "_Tombes de la lumiere,_" he mumbled, giving a sickly smile. "_Fortifies par les tenebres ... L'horreur approche._"

Lara broke away from the drug addict's grip and ran down the alley. The raindrops relentlessly pricked her body like hundreds of cold needles. Behind her, the man let out a hoarse laughter and his words echoed through the alley: "L'HORREUR! L'HORREUR APPROCHE! MONSTRUM!"

Lara dashed for the wide street that the alley opened on to. She could hear sirens somewhere to her right. When she was about five metres from the end of the alley, the source of the noise came skidding into view. The huge white van spun around 90 degrees before stopping with the back doors facing the alley. Lara stopped to see the doors burst open as two trained dogs leapt out and started running through the alley to bite her face off.

Lara's eyes darted around until they found an old-looking door in the wall to her left. She looked back at the bloodthirsty Dobermans, then rushed up to the door and let her shoulder connect with the fragile wood. The door swung back and she found herself in a derelict, cockroach-riddled hall with empty cardboard boxes lying everywhere and a long, filthy staircase leading up in the middle. "_Paris, city of beauty. Well, they don't show this in the brochures._"

Behind her, the cacophony of barks grew louder. Lara sprinted up the staircase. By the time she reached the second floor, the animals were already scurrying into the hall, closely followed by armed cops. Lara cursed herself for not closing and bolting the door behind her.

The staircase led to a dimly lit corridor with cobwebs hanging all over the ceiling. Lara ran to her right towards a dead end. Her only hope was to jump through the window in the middle of the white wall, but it looked too narrow. She cast a brief glance over her shoulder. The curs were only a few metres behind her.

Lara stopped in front of the window. It was way too narrow. Escape was now utterly impossible. The dogs jumped up at her, slobber dripping from their razorsharp teeth. Lara held her arms out in front of her face and clenched her eyes shut ...

As the Dobermans collided with her body, Lara stumbled back and felt glass shatter all around her. Suddenly, she was falling through cold air. Then, she landed on a crammed plastic bag, rolled off and landed once more on wet cobblestones.

Lara's eyelids fluttered open. She was lying in a messy courtyard. A throbbing migraine pervaded her head as she slowly got up, scant of breath. Her eyes looked up to meet the glares of the growling Dobermans perched on the windowsill above her. One of them held her old brown backpack in its mouth. Apparently, the dog had ripped off the backpack just before she fell out the window. Besides having a certain sentimental value, that pack contained her wallet, passport and cash.

"Damn cur," Lara muttered and darted off through the nearest doorway.

---

In a warm office many miles away from the seedy district Lara Croft was being chased through, Commissioner Mirepoix stood at the window and contemplated the view of the dark metropolis. He had worked here for years, but never encountered any criminal as gruesome and elusive as the Monstrum. And now there had been another victim, some defenceless old guy on Rue Valise.

The commissioner sighed and sat back down at his desk. He sipped his cup of pitchblack coffee, let his fingers rest on the familiar keyboard and started writing the report:

**Central National Bureau, Paris**

**Commissioner Mirepoix, Special Crimes Investigation Force**

**To the Préfecture de Police.**

**REPORT ON RECENT SERIAL ATROCITIES WITHIN THE CAPITAL**

The man paused, pondering whether "atrocities" was the right word to use in this context. These reports would usually have the word "murders" instead, but in his opinion, that wasn't enough to describe the Monstrums' actions. They weren't just ordinary murders ... He shuddered, took another sip of coffee and continued writing:

**As yet, no significant arrests have been made for this latest spate of 'Monstrum' killings in the capital. There have been seventeen reported murders so far. It would appear to be the work of a single, highly psychotic perpetrator.**

**The press have sensationalised this latest outbreak as "The Monstrum's Dark Renaissance", referring to similar atrocities in the capital over the last decade, and possibly as far back as the 1950's. There are definite links to atrocities in other European cities going back at least fifty years.**

**Forensics have made no headway regarding the bizarre metallic eruptions found on the bodies of all victims. At present, nothing appears to link any of the individuals involved. There have been significant numbers of casualties within Parisian gangland factions.**

**The name of the latest victim was just released – a professor Werner Von Croy. A female was seen leaving his apartment. Described as Caucasian, brunette, about 1.8m and of slim build, she was wearing jeans, denim jacket and a pony tail. She is dangerous and probably armed. Officers are being advised to use extreme caution when arresting the suspect. Her apprehension should be made top priority.**

Mirepoix leaned back in his chair and emptied his cup of coffee. He stood and turned around to look out the window. Somewhere out there, that mysterious brown-haired woman was on the run. Whether she was guilty or not, he and his investigation force were going to do all they could to catch her.

---

Lara ran across the industrial rooftops, closely followed by the green police helicopter that had been hovering around her for the last ten minutes. Its searchlight effortlessly cut through the rain to envelop her body in a blinding white glare. Expert snipers inside the chopper fired their rifles every 4-5 seconds. The fugitive could nearly feel the heat of the bullets whistling by, just inches away from piercing her legs.

A male voice roared through a megaphone somewhere in the chopper: "SUSPECT SPOTTED ON ROOF!"

"You don't say," Lara muttered.

"THROW DOWN YOUR WEAPONS!"

"I don't even _have_ any weapons!" Lara yelled back.

Naturally, the officers couldn't hear her. "SURRENDER! THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING!"

Lara found herself cornered on the edge of the rooftop. The fall to the alley below was several storeys high. The snipers in the helicopter were still shooting, forcing her to keep moving. Lara's eyes fixed on a white box at the top of a drainpipe on the brick wall in front of her. The jump from this rooftop to the pipe looked about four yards long, but she had no choice. Either she would get her brains blown out here, or she'd die on the pavement below, or she'd grab hold of the pipe. Lara prayed for the last-mentioned possibility as she took a running jump from the rooftop and sailed through the chilly air.

Apparently, the prayer was heard. Her left hand managed to get a weak grip on the slippery box at the top of the pipe. Her right hand immediately flew up to aid its counterpart, but the box quickly succumbed to the woman's weight and fell off the wall.

Lara let out a high-pitched shriek, which abruptly ended when she landed in a rusty dumpster. The helicopter flew off above her, the pilot realizing they couldn't follow her into the narrow alley. "Suspect has escaped," the guy with the megaphone declared, then added: "_Merde._"

"Ugh, my head," Lara groaned as she climbed out of the dumpster. "Way too many police. What was that adress?" She reached into a pocket in her jeans and pulled out the card Werner had given her minutes before his untimely demise. She glanced at the adress of a "Mlle. Margot Carvier" and started walking down the alley.

---

It only took Lara a quarter to find the woman's apartment. She rang the bell and heard Madame Carvier's voice seep through the intercom system next to the wooden door: "_Qui est là?_"

"Mademoiselle Carvier, it's Lara Croft. I need your help."

Carvier promptly opened the door. The professor was in her late sixties and wore crescent-shaped, orange glasses and distinguished, formal clothes. She was a historian and academic at the Dept. of Medieval and Renaissance Studies and had been involved in recent archaeological digs beneath the Louvre. "Miss Croft," she said, running her green eyes over Lara. "I recognize you from photos and Werner's description. Come in."

"Thank you," Lara said and stepped into the woman's humble abode. A few colourful fish swam around aimlessly in a small aquarium. The wood crackled away in the fireplace. The whole flat had an overall cozy atmosphere that Werner's place had completely lacked. Lara noticed the newspaper on the coffee table had an article about the Monstrum's sixteenth victim, a teenage girl who had been mutilated in a backstreet not far from the Eiffel Tower.

"An evil night to be out alone, Miss Croft. Our streets are not safe anymore."

"Mademoiselle Carvier, I have just come from Werner's apartment."

"And how is Werner?" You could tell by her tone that she and Werner were more than just colleagues.

Lara closed her eyes and prepared to deliver the bad news. "I'm afraid that Werner ... is dead."

"Dead?!" Behind the crescent-shaped glasses, Carvier's eyes seemed on the verge of falling right out.

"Yes, and I don't have time to waste. I'm being chased all over Paris," Lara said.

"How was Werner killed? Tell me what happened," Carvier ordered.

Lara gave a deep sigh. If she'd wanted an interrogation like this, she would have gone with the police. "It's all a bit vague. I arrived at his apartment today. He was babbling with fear."

"He said he'd tried to contact you," Carvier said.

"He did," Lara confirmed. "I never expected that. Not after Egypt."

"Werner has been fearful for his life. He accepted a commission five weeks ago. Since then, he's been acting strangely, jumping at shadows. He even left a package with me for safe-keeping."

"Package?"

"His notebook, adressed to you," Carvier explained.

"Who was that commission from?" Lara asked, even though she already knew the answer. Werner had told her himself. '_I'm tracking five Obscura paintings for a client called Eckhardt, but he's a psychopath ..._'

"The client's name was Eckhardt. He wanted Werner to research something called the "Obscura paintings". Werner approached me at my department at the Louvre."

"Were you able to help him?"

"A little, I think. Poor Werner was clearly terrified."

"Werner didn't scare easily," Lara remarked.

"He felt he was being stalked," Carvier elaborated.

"He could well have been. The "Monstrum" is running around Paris, according to the press. You mentioned Werner's notebook earlier, Mademoiselle?"

"Yes, his field notebook. He said he wanted you to have it, if anything happened to him."

"If he left his notebook, he really was spooked," Lara stated.

"You still haven't explained what happened," Carvier reminded the woman.

"We argued, I can remember that. And – gunfire!"

"Gunfire?!" Carvier repeated, dumbfounded. "Werner was shot? Did you kill him?"

"I can't remember. It's all a blur," Lara replied truthfully.

Carvier's eyes narrowed. "Miss Croft, I _strongly_ suggest that you talk to the police."

Lara rolled her eyes. "If I'd wanted to kill Werner, I could have done that in Egypt!"

"You don't look too convinced yourself," Carvier remarked with a voice as cold as the rain outside.

"I'm not going to waste any more time here! Do you have the notebook?"

"I do. It's safe for the moment."

"I really _am_ going to need Werner's notebook," Lara implored.

"Somebody killed Werner, and you say you don't remember clearly what happened? Perhaps the police _are_ right in suspecting you," Carvier said.

"I never killed Werner!"

"I think you'd better leave, Ms Croft."

"The notebook?"

Carvier sighed and walked into the kitchen, where she dug a musty brown notebook out from a cabinet and handed it to her guest. "I am not sure this is the right thing to do, but I must respect what Werner wanted."

"The right choice, Mademoiselle," Lara said, slipping the book into her pocket.

Carvier opened a white door and stepped into her bedroom next to the kitchen. "And now you had better go; the police will be here any minute."

"Police?"

Carvier shut the door and locked it. Her voice was still audible from the other side: "I called them when you turned up on my doorstep. It was for ... insurance."

"You're all heart." Before leaving, Lara snatched a pen from the desk. She quickly found a window five yards above the backstreet. A police car pulled up outside and two gendarmes came rushing out, probably the ones Carvier had called. Lara patiently waited for them to enter the apartment building and disappear from sight. She then hopped out the window, landing roughly on the cobblestones, and fled down the dingy backstreets, looking for a safe hiding place. Unlike the Parisian police, her first priority was to get some much needed sleep.

---

_She hangs from the ledge again, so close to the exit of this hellish ancient temple. Sunlight of the first dawn of the year 2000 comes flowing in around Werner Von Croy's figure as he stands in the doorway and reaches out a bony, shaking hand to save his protégé. _"_Give me your hand, child!_"

"_Good to see you again, Werner,_" _she groans. Her fingers slowly, but surely slide down from the ledge and there's no doubt in her mind that her fall into the abyss beneath is both inevitable and imminent._

"_I couldn't leave you!"_

_The rock collapses, sealing the doorway. She falls screaming into a black sea of darkness and drowns there in feelings of fear and desperation ..._

Lara's eyes snapped open and she awoke from a nightmare slightly worse than her reality. She slowly got up from the floor of the old, graffiti-covered train resting abandoned in a weed-plagued yard. How long had she slept here? Her watch was in the backpack the trained dog had ripped from her, but she could tell by the sky outside that it had to be about 6 A.M. "_I must've slept at least five hours, and I still feel tired as hell ..._"

Lara sat down on the cleanest seat of the filthy train car and produced the notebook and pen she'd gotten in Carvier's flat. Right now, she just wanted to get her thoughts formulated and down on paper. She found an empty page and started writing:

**Of all the terrors in the world today, the thing that haunts me still is Egypt. That, and Werner's death. I could never forgive him for what he did, but no one deserved to die like that, not for some damn paintings. Someone has to pay. I just have to decide who. And how!**

---

A/N: As you might have deduced, I am more than a little influenced by the infamous "lost text" of AoD ...


	3. Parisian Ghetto

Chapter 3: Parisian Ghetto

"_Well, better check out what Werner wrote here,_" Lara thought, opening the notebook on the very first page. The late professor's elegant handwriting covered the crumpled, yellow pages:

**Eckhardt – client. Be wary!**

**Terrified to go out. Monstrum terrorising the streets. **

**Tried contacting Lara again in London. No response. Still not forgiven me for Egypt.**

**Louis Bouchard. Useful contact – purchased handgun. Discretion assured. **

"_Great, a lead. I'll just find that Bouchard guy and ask him about all this._" Lara closed the notebook and put it in her pocket, deciding to read the rest some other time. On her way out of the deserted train car, Lara spotted a ring lying under one of the seats. She crouched down to examine it. "A … a diamond ring! Breaks your heart what people lose," Lara muttered, slipping the valuable find into her pocket. There had to be some place in this neighbourhood where she could pawn the ring for cash.

She stepped out of the car and found herself in a huge, rectangular yard with weed and shrubs growing between old train tracks. Colourful graffiti covered the walls and large grey pipes lay in disarranged heaps. Birds could be heard chirping somewhere high above this godforsaken dump. At the other end, two homeless men were warming themselves at a barrel with flames rising from it.

Lara made her way out of the yard by jumping up to the train roof and climbing a few fences. At the top, she reached a narrow walkway surrounding the yard. A muscular guy in his early twenties stood in the corner. A white cap was seated on his shaved head and a lit cigarette rested between his index and middle finger. Intricate black tattoos adorned his bare arms. Lara reckoned he was either a drug dealer, male prostitute or both. "You looking for anything special, little lady?" he inquired.

"So what are you? A city guide?" Lara asked.

"That's right," he nodded. "I'm a city guide; all tastes and interests catered for." His face displayed eagerness for having Lara as a customer.

"I'm trying to find a man called Bouchard – do you know him?"

The guy shook his head. "That's not a healthy kind of question to be asking."

"Don't tell me Paris is dangerous," Lara said.

"Oh, we've got all kinds of rough stuff here in Paris. Including our own serial killer. Have you heard of the Monstrum, huh? Have you heard of him?"

Lara knit her brows. "The Monstrum is a _him_? How do you know that?"

"I don't know what _it_ is, but I'd watch my rear on the streets if I didn't know my way around," he admonished.

"Which you obviously do. So how do I find this Bouchard?"

"He won't have time for casual callers. Been having staff problems at his club, a flashy joint called Le Serpent Rouge."

"Why should losing staff be such a big deal?" Lara asked.

"Because these staff are dying on the job. No one knows why or how. And they didn't die pretty. It's got Bouchard really shaken."

"Is it the Monstrum?"

"Who knows for sure? I just try to keep my nose clean – you should, too."

"See you around," Lara said and stepped through a grey door in the brick wall, entering a wide street on the other side. "**LE SERPENT ROUGE**" was written with scarlet letters above the entrance to a five-storey building to her immediate right. "_Red Snake, huh? Must be the nightclub he mentioned._"

A blonde lady in her thirties stood at the edge of the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette and glancing at her watch every ten seconds. She wore a tight red top, black leather pants and shoes with ludicrously high heels. Her face was utterly smothered in makeup. "_Nice class of people on the streets,_" Lara sarcastically mused, then asked: "Not a lot of passing trade at this hour?"

"It's early yet. Move along, _Ma Chere_ - you make the place look crowded."

Lara felt like punching the hooker there and then. Instead, she dug her nails into her palms and retorted in her most snobbish tone: "I wouldn't worry. We're not in the same class."

The woman smiled, sucked smoke from her cigarette and blew a grey puff into Lara's face: "That attitude won't get you far around here, sweet thing."

"I just want to find someone. Name of Bouchard."

"You won't find him here, _Ma cher. _He did run the club across the road, Le Serpent Rouge, but had to move premises. I heard there was a lot of trouble. Things needed to lie quiet for a while."

"And no one knows where he is?"

"What do you need with a dangerous individual like Bouchard?"

"I'm trying to track down a friend's movements," Lara explained.

"Lost is he?" the prostitute said.

"Dead. But he made contact with Bouchard before he … checked out."

"Tell you what. There's this guy who used to work at Le Serpent Rouge."

"So Bouchard didn't lose everybody?"

"No, this guy left before the troubles closed the place down. His name's Pierre. Worked as a barman there and makes bad deals that backfire on him. He runs the café in the Place d'Arcade now, Café Metro. Oh, and he claims Bouchard held back some money or something of his and kept it at the club. I don't know the details."

"You seem to know plenty – thanks. I didn't catch your name …"

"Janice. Everyone knows me around here. Look, be careful, _Cherie_. Bouchard's a mean operator, and he's been targeted hard recently," Janice informed.

"Does anyone know who's causing Bouchard all this grief? Or why?"

"No, or they're not saying. The Monstrum has got everyone too scared to talk."

"I'd have thought Bouchard would be geared up for trouble," Lara remarked.

"He can handle it allright. No one better," Janice said. "But the way his people have been dying … so ugly. And that poor woman …"

"What woman?"

"Someone called Carvier. She worked at the Louvre, it said on the radio. I don't want to talk about it."

"Carvier!" Lara exclaimed, thoughts flying back to that rainy night and the cozy apartment which was now been splattered with its owner's blood. Could she have killed Carvier as well? Lord knows she'd have a motive – Carvier had, to put it bluntly, pissed her off with all her cold accusations and distrustfulness.

"You watch out, _Ma Cher_. There's a lot of sickoes loose on the streets."

"Yeah," Lara said.

"And that's okay. Some of us like it that way," Janice grinned.

Lara left Janice and sauntered down the street. '**Find Bouchard's new premises. Contact café owner, Pierre, ex-barman at the club**,' she scribbled in the notebook. After a minute, she reached a dull little building with grey brick walls. However, the sign above the wooden door caught her interest: '**Daniel Rennes - Prêteur sur Gage**'.

Pulling the diamond ring out from her pocket, Lara opened the door and walked through a short corridor brightly lit by a single unshielded bulb. The air felt sour and stale. Stepping through a doorway in the left wall, Lara entered a cramped room filled with items in pawn. Rusty bicycles, video tapes, armchairs, a dryer, boxes filled with books, old records and other furniture and antiquities were piled up in an enormous mess. At the back of the room, a middle-aged man stood behind the counter, leafing through a magazine.

Lara courageously ventured through the jungle of pawned items and emerged at the counter, where she could get a better look at the owner of the shop, Daniel Rennes. He wore a red shirt with the sleeves tucked up and a brown hat over his greying hair. His face looked oddly weather-beaten and pale, with a pointed chin and narrow, bloodshot eyes. "Open for business?" Lara asked.

"You managed to get in, didn't you?" the pawnbroker said.

"Just checking. I didn't want to waste your time, or mine."

"Discretion is my middle name. Especially with strangers who just walk in off the street."

"How concerned are you with legal niceties?" Lara inquired.

"What concerns me is the police. They ask a lot of questions," Rennes replied.

"Do you?"

"If it suits me. I make my own rules … Are you buying or selling?"

"What would this be worth?" Lara handed him the diamond ring.

Rennes snatched the ring and examined it in the light of the old chandelier hanging from the ceiling. "Very nice. Not an antiquity, but nice," he said, putting it in his pocket, from which he then produced a brown wallet.

Lara frowned when he gave her the measly price of 125 Euros in return. "What's a good time of day to catch you in a generous mood?"

"This is a business, not a charity!"

"And next you're going to say – 'Take it or leave it' – right?"

"Take it or leave it," Rennes grumbled.

"Hey, turn down the charisma. Allright, I'll take it," Lara said, slipping the crumpled bills into her pocket. "_Phew, the types you have to deal with these days,_" she thought as she walked out of the pawnshop and down the short corridor to the street.

---

Lara had been following the signs towards Place d'Arcade for five minutes when she saw the newspaper shop. It was a humble little stand on the sidewalk, selling everything from intelligent political magazines to hardcore pornography. "What can I get you, M'moiselle?" the young shopgirl behind the counter asked.

"Do you know someone called Bouchard?"

"I've been on this spot for five years. I know everyone."

"Do you know how he can be contacted?"

"Directly? No. And I hope I never have to."

"To save some time, how could I avoid having to talk to every inhabitant this side of the river?" Lara inquired.

"Without the right connections – my guess, no one would talk to you. And a lot depends on _how_ you ask your questions, not _who_ you ask. You know, everyone on the streets is terrified at the moment," the shopgirl said.

"I've found that already … Do you have any foreign language newspapers? The London Times?"

"As chance would have it, I do."

"Do you do barter?"

"I'm so sorry. Cash only."

Lara paid the shopgirl and grabbed the latest edition of London Times. "Is there anywhere to get a drink nearby?" she asked.

"Try Café Metro," the shopgirl advised. "The coffee's good even if the owner is a complete loser. He's well known for it, actually. By the way, if you really want to see Bouchard, try finding the Doorman. He's Bouchard's bodyguard."

"The Doorman … What would I need to get past him?" Lara asked.

"Money. A password."

"Who would know the right password?"

"I'm afraid I can't help you there. _Bon chance_. Do you want to keep change?" the shopgirl asked. The paper cost three €, but Lara had paid five.

"Keep it."

"_Merci._"

"You're welcome," Lara said and walked off to sit down on a wobbly bench nearby, under the shade of an old olive tree. The front page of the London Times had a photo of Carvier's mutilated body lying on the floor of her apartment. Her mouth was frozen in a silent scream of terror and her glazed eyes wide open, staring at Lara with the same accusing glare Werner's corpse had given her. Lara shuddered and read the article:

**PARISIAN 'MONSTRUM' KILLINGS CONTINUE - LARA CROFT WANTED FOR QUESTIONING**

**The latest victim of the Paris 'Monstrum' was discovered yesterday. The body of a professor Margot Carvier was found after a woman was seen leaving the building under suspicious circumstances. The police are anxious to interview Lara Croft. The notorious Monstrum serial killer has periodically terrorized Paris and other European capitals over the last decade. A characteristic of these attacks is the bizarre metallic eruptions on many parts of the victims' bodies. Forensic specialists are mystified by the process involved. The current suspect is described as Caucasian, brunette and of slim build. When last seen, she was wearing jeans, dark jacket and a pony tail. **

Lara didn't need a mirror to realize this was an accurate description of herself. "_So, I really am wanted by the police. Great. If only I had some kind of proof that I'm not the real killer…_" Hoping that Werner had written another clue there, Lara opened the notebook where she had left off and read the late professor's notes:

**Obscura paintings: Five 15th century works of black alchemic magic. All lost, hidden by the Lux Veritatis. Five Obscura engravings – drawn copies of the paintings. Contain encrypted maps of each painting's location? **

---

On her way to Place d'Arcade, Lara noticed a large iron gate in the wall at Saint Aicard's graveyard. Behind the entrance, a heavy barrel was placed in front of the part of the gate that opened inwards. A tanned, muscular guy stood next to the barrel, as if guarding the gate. He wore pitchblack sunglasses and a plethora of gold-chains hung around his bull neck. "Hi, I'm trying to find someone called Bouchard," Lara said.

"No one of that name in these parts," the guard grumbled.

"He'll want to see me."

"Then I hope you find him."

"Look, I really have to see Bouchard," Lara said, starting to suspect that this was in fact the infamous Doorman, guarding Bouchard's secret premises.

"Nothing doing. I have the biggest Doberman Pinscher you've ever seen on this side of the gate. And in ten seconds, I'm going to let him out for walkies."

"Suit yourself, but I doubt Fido would be having any more walks if he bumped into me," Lara said and wandered away before the Doorman could retort.

---

Café Metro was located on the first floor of a thoroughly unremarkable building with a sleek motorcycle parked next to the entrance. Lara entered the cozy restaurant and was surprised to find it abandoned with the exceptions of Pierre behind the bar and a strange man sitting in the corner to her immediate right. The customer in the corner was a lean guy in his mid-thirties, drinking a glass of red wine and reading a newspaper. In fact, it was the same edition of London Times that Lara had purchased earlier.

Lara pondered if the stranger had read the article about Carvier's murder, and if so, whether he would notice Lara's resemblance with the Monstrum suspect. Concluding that he didn't look like the type who would bother calling the cops even if he did notice the similarities, she ignored the man and approached the counter to question Pierre, a twenty-something bloke with crew-cut brown hair. "I'm trying to find …"

"What can I get you to drink?" Pierre interrupted.

"I don't want a drink," Lara said, "I …"

"Only paying customers welcome. There's the door," the barman informed, superfluously pointing to the door Lara had just entered through.

"Are you Pierre?" Lara tried.

"Possibly … What can I get you?"

"Information."

"Really? Well, everyone wants something for nothing."

"It needn't be for nothing. We could trade."

"Trade?"

"You used to work at Le Serpent Rouge. I need to find your ex-boss Bouchard."

"You don't look like police."

"No, but I do deal with problems - sort them out."

"What sort of problems?"

"What sort of problems do you have?" Lara asked. "Any situations need clearing up? Difficulties removed?"

"In exchange for information about Louis Bouchard." Pierre frowned. "That's dangerous information."

"I'm a dangerous girl," Lara said. "And right now, I'm losing patience."

"I do have a 'situation' that needs tidying. A retrieval job. Something I forgot to pick up from Le Serpent Rouge when I left. It's mine and I want it back."

"Why don't you just go and pick it up yourself?"

"Two guesses."

"Bouchard? The Monstrum?"

"Don't joke about the Monstrum!" Pierre hissed. "Bouchard ran a lot of operations there. The place will be staked out."

"Just tell me where the item is in the club."

"It's a small box. Small enough to fit inside one of the stage lights – the one that doesn't work."

"That's it? Okay. I can work with that," Lara said as she wrote in her notebook: '**Retrieve the box at Serpent Rouge, in broken lighting rig.**' "How do I get into the club?"

Pierre gave Lara a small key. "This'll get you in behind the stage area at the back. Return what's mine to me, and I'll put you in touch with Bouchard."

"I'm sure he'll be glad to hear from you again," Lara remarked.

"He isn't going to. I just tell you where to find him, then it's up to you."

"Okay. And if this doesn't work out, I know where to find you – don't I, Pierre?" Lara pivoted and walked out of the café. The man sitting in the corner looked up from his paper as she stepped out the door. Through the dingy window, he watched her walk down the street until she disappeared into an alley. He then emptied his glass of wine, left the newspaper on the table, walked up to the bar and sat down on a stool in front of Pierre.

"Well, now that she's off on her little errand at Le Serpent Rouge, why don't you and I have a little chat?" the customer suggested. He pulled out a silvery 9mm semi-automatic from his shoulder holster and took aim at Pierre's chest with a relaxed, casual movement. "Put your hands where I can see them."

Pierre raised his shaking, pale arms and folded hands behind his neck. "What do you want?"

"The same information miss Croft wanted. I might not be as friendly as her, so give me the answers before I run out of patience, okay? By the way, that wine was terrible."

---

A/N: He he, poor Pierre …


	4. Le Serpent Rouge

Chapter 4: Le Serpent Rouge

After five minutes of jogging through the gloomy backstreets, Lara was back at Cours la Seine, the desolate avenue where Rennes' pawnshop was situated. This time she entered the street from an abrupt stairway opposite the nightclub. Janice was still standing farther down the street to Lara's right.

Across the road, a sleek motorbike was parked next to the opening of the Rue de Clef, a narrow alley between a decrepit office building and Le Serpent Rouge. Lara recalled seeing the exact same bike parked outside Pierre's café.

She soon had another déja vu moment when the man from Café Metro's corner came running out of the alley and jumped on his bike. The tires screeched against the asphalt as he made a fierce 180 degree turn. For a few seconds, he just sat there, twisting the throttle.

Lara could now get a better look at the stranger. He seemed about 36 years old, somewhat pale and of normal height and weight. His stringy brown hair fell into his blue eyes, below which two dark bags indicated very unhealthy sleeping habits. A slight goatee bedecked his chin. He wore greenish trousers and a dark blue t-shirt over a long-sleeved white shirt. A 9mm pistol rested in the brown leather holster strapped around his shoulder.

The bike's low growl turned into a deafening roar as he whizzed down Cours la Seine, leaving only some warm puffs of smoke and an annoyed, coughing Lara Croft behind.

Lara walked across the street and down the alley the guy had come from. A rusty fence blocked the opposite opening. Beyond it, a beautiful river cut through the polluted town, its surface perfectly reflecting the factory buildings on the other side.

Lara hadn't come to admire the view, though. There was a door in the right wall with a sign reading '**STAGE ENTRANCE**'. She unlocked it, tossed the key over the fence and waited for the unmistakeable '_plop_' of a certain metallic object plunging through the water surface. Then, she entered the backstage of Le Serpent Rouge, closing the door noiselessly behind her.

The trespasser found herself in the corner of a drab, cold corridor beneath the actual club. Far ahead, a steep stairway led upwards to the dance floor. The hallway to her left led to a cramped office, where a guy wearing sunglasses and a typical guard's uniform stood with his back to Lara. "_Crap, Pierre was right. The place really is staked out. Better be careful._"

A key and a pistol lay on the desk in front of the guard. Lara decided to use stealth to take him out. She snuck across the hallway and flicked a light switch on the wall. The guard's office was immediately enveloped in darkness. "_Zut_," he mumbled, turned around and switched his flashlight on to illuminate the hallway ahead. "_Salut à tous?_"

Lara quickly slipped into a dusty room opposite the corner where she had first entered the hallway. In the shadowy corner between two narrow doorways, Lara had a good view of the corridor outside as she gave the wall a long, intimate hug, waiting for the guard to pass by.

However, when the guard reached the door to Lara's left, he shone the flashlight's beam into the room as if suspecting her presence there. Lara carefully slid down to the floor and picked up an empty beer can. Just as the guard was about to step into the room, she flung the can through the doorway to her right. It clattered on the floor farther down the corridor.

"_Il y a quelqu'un?_" he said and walked past Lara's hiding place towards the area the mysterious rattling had come from. Lara left the corner room and crept up behind him.

The moment the flashlight's beam fell on the empty can, Lara gripped the guard's shoulders and threw him down on the floor. Her left fist connected with his neck twice and sent the man drifting down a short river of pain before being washed ashore in dreamland. Lara snatched a M-V9 semi-automatic from his black shoulder holster. Unfortunately, the gun lacked ammo.

Lara tucked the 9mm into her pocket and walked back through the corridor to the guard's office. She beamed at finding an advanced .50 caliber Desert Ranger on the desk, loaded with 9 bullets. A ring with four keys attached lay next to the pistol. The tag read '**Scène clé**'.

"Stage key. Sounds like I could need it," Lara muttered, slipping the key into her pocket. Armed with the Desert Ranger, she jogged back down the hallway, past the unconscious guard and up the dingy stairway. At the top, she reached a metallic door with '**Piste de danse**' written on the plate. Lara produced the key ring and unlocked the door with the first key she tried. She slid the door ajar and peeked through the narrow gap between the door and frame.

Another guard stood leaned against a huge speaker at the back of the main room. Lara pulled out her Desert Ranger, taking perfect aim at the unsuspecting guard's torso. And for the first time since the events in Egypt several years ago, Lara Croft fired a handgun.

The bullet whizzed across the dance floor and into the guard's stomach. Blood squirted out and the dull, grey floor attained a rose-red colour as the man collapsed, either dead or unconscious.

Naturally, another guard noticed. The man sprinted towards the stage door, aiming his M-V9 at the intruder's head. Lara slammed the door shut and listened as the bullets glanced off from the metal surface on the other side.

"Shit" the guard breathed, realizing he had run out of ammo. Fifteen quiet seconds passed while Lara stood motionless in the corner next to the door. Suddenly, the door slid aside and the guard burst into the hallway, holding up a half-full bottle of cognac to assault the intruder.

Lara immediately pressed the Desert Ranger's muzzle against the side of his neck and took the improvised weapon from his hand. She briefly examined the bottle to find the vintage.

"Hmm, an 1851. Now there's something you don't see every day." Lara took a few gulps and then promptly smashed the bottle into the guard's head. The unconscious man tumbled down the stairs and landed in a bruised heap on the basement floor.

The main room was an immense, dimly lit hall with a long bar situated to Lara's immediate right as she entered from backstage. Far off to her right, a steel staircase led up to the higher levels of the club. Huge speakers and boxes were scattered haphazardly in the middle. A DJ booth loomed over the dance floor to Lara's left.

The whole place had a filthy, desolate look that made it nigh impossible to imagine how this could ever have been one of the hottest, most crowded and popular clubs in Paris. The stale air was filled with a silence only broken by muffled clanks from some faraway machinery. Cockroaches and cobwebs riddled the shadowy corners, that had once been brightly illuminated by disco lights.

"_Yeuck. No one cleans up here, obviously,_" Lara mused as she climbed up to the DJ booth, where old techno and house singles rested on the turntables. She flicked a large switch on the wall.

The dusty records spun into life and fast beats pumped out of the speakers. Accompanying the deafening music, the lighting rigs far above started sweeping through the air, beams of flickering light shooting out from the lamps to envelop the dance floor in a colourful, surreal glare. Lara couldn't supress an astonished smile at seeing the long lost glory of Le Serpent Rouge revived.

She wasn't the only one here to witness this revival, though. Two guards came running out with M-V9s to take care of the trespasser. Lara vaulted out of the DJ booth and fired the Desert Ranger twice as she fell to the dance floor. The first shot plunged into the right thigh of one of the guards. He fell screaming to the ground while the second bullet whistled into one of the speakers.

Crackling sparks, wires and electromagnets exploded out from the black box, but the music kept pumping through the room. Beams of bluish strobe light shrouded Lara's movements, making it hard for the remaining guard to take aim at his target.

Lara gracefully let her feet connect with the man's head. A yellow light beam made the guard look like he was spitting lemonade in lieu of blood as he collapsed to the cold floor. Lara jogged up the staircase to the second floor and started climbing upwards to reach the lighting rigs at the top of the hall.

It only took a couple of minutes to get to the top floor, three storeys above the dancing stage. The electronic soundscape pounded at Lara's ears as she reached into a cabinet above the broken disco light, which flickered pathetically in its death throes. Her hand emerged from the cabinet with a trinket box.

Resisting the temptation to take a peek at the mysterious contents, Lara slipped Pierre's box into her pocket and climbed down a short ladder to a drawbridge below. A booth for controlling the lighting was located on the other side of the bridge. Lara had used it earlier to move the broken light closer. Now, another guard emerged from the booth, handgun drawn and taking aim.

Lara quickly aimed her own pistol, but her frantic trigger-squeezing was merely rewarded with a quiet click from the unloaded gun. "Goddammit," Lara said, flinging the now useless Desert Ranger at the guard. The latter smirked arrogantly when the empty handgun went flying right past his head.

However, that little distraction was all Lara needed for her real attack. She effortlessly hopped up, her left foot taking off from the bridge railing to whirl her body 360 degrees around above the guard. In the blink of an eye, her right foot had kicked the man's chest and sent him tumbling over the railing.

Lara returned to the bridge floor in time to lean out and watch the guy fall through the colourfully illuminated, music-pervaded air before landing on the dance floor. "_Well, can't say that was a dull way to die._" Lara crossed the drawbridge, walked through the lighting booth and left the club through a metal door opposite the control panel.

---

"Did you …? Everything go ok?" Pierre said the moment Lara entered the room from the windy midday street outside. Café Metro looked the same as when she had last visited, although the customer in the corner was now gone, leaving only his newspaper and the empty glass behind.

"It's quiet in here," Lara said, walking up to the bar. "Your voice really carries."

"Don't mess me about," Pierre hissed.

"You were right about the place being staked out. There were gunmen all over the place. No sign of the Monstrum, though." Lara sat down on the cleanest-looking barstool and produced the trinket box from her pocket.

"You got it!" Pierre grinned from ear to ear.

"Now, a little matter of Bouchard's whereabouts …?"

"Bouchard. Yes … er…"

Lara loomed in over the counter, staring right into Pierre's shifty, twitching eyes. "You aren't going to disappoint me, are you? You don't want to see my dangerous side …"

"No, it's just that someone else was asking for him. Just after you left."

"Asking for Bouchard?" Lara said, interest more than a little piqued.

"Yes. The customer who was sat in the corner, reading his paper. I couldn't tell him anything, naturally," Pierre lied. "But he may have overheard us."

Lara furrowed her brows and recalled the guy she had seen leaving the Cours la Seine on his bike. "_What the hell is he up to?_" she inwardly pondered, then adressed Pierre: "You know, you talk real loud. It's hard not to notice it."

"Stop wasting my time. Hand it over," Pierre commanded, referring to the much coveted box Lara was holding right in front of him.

"Information first, Pierre," Lara snapped. "Bouchard's whereabouts?"

"No chance. Gimme the box first."

Lara tilted her head and gave the bartender a put-on sad, wounded look. "Pierre, what happened to our friendship? You didn't ask if I got hurt at the club …"

"Cut it out! You need my help. Bouchard is a hard man to find. And he's been under a lot of pressure lately. Make the wrong approach and you're dead."

"I can be very careful. And so should you - especially if you want this." Lara shook the trinket box and something rattled inside.

"That's mine! Hand it over!"

"I don't think this friendship is working out - is it, Pierre?"

"You can't back out now. You'll never find him without my help."

"D'you know, I'm tempted to try anyway. It'd be your style to set me up for a double cross," Lara said, replacing the box in her pocket. "How hard can it be to track down someone with his reputation?"

"Real hard, without the right contacts. And not everyone is as polite as me."

"Or as loud, hopefully."

"But they might be more dangerous. The Monstrum isn't the only killer on the streets."

"_You_ would do well to remember that, Pierre."

The barman shook his head. "Take it easy. Are we going to deal?"

"Only if you behave …"

"Allright. Bouchard is lying low, and I know someone who can show you where."

"You can trust them, this person you know?" Lara inquired.

"Just about. Name of Francine," Pierre said. "She's my ex."

"Reassuring."

"This is her adress, and the code for the gate." Pierre handed Lara a coffee-stained card with the adress and code scribbled on it.

"And she can point me to Bouchard? You're sure?"

"Oh, absolutely. She knows a discrete route to the back of the premises."

"Discrete?" Lara frowned. "Translation: Dangerous."

"Nothing in Paris is safe," Pierre replied. "But this route will get you where you want to go. Please. It's arranged; she's expecting you."

"I hope this arrangement works out, Pierre. I'd hate for you to become a personal problem that I have to come back and tidy up," Lara said as she started towards the exit.

"Hey, what about my …"

Interrupting Pierre's query, Lara tossed the trinket box over her shoulder and left the café. The box sailed through the air and past Pierre's clumsy hands as he failed to catch it. "_Merde_! I hate that bitch," he grumbled under his breath and stooped down to retrieve the box from the filthy floor.

---

In the pawnshop on Cours la Seine, Daniel Rennes was still standing behind the counter, leafing absent-mindedly through old porno magazines. He glanced at his watch and saw that an hour had passed since the annoying brunette's visit. The valuable ring she had pawned now rested on his bony little finger.

Daniel Rennes had always been an intelligent man. He didn't have morals, but he did have a sharp, brilliant mind. He had started his dangerous lifestyle at the age of 14. The kid had made millions of Euros by blackmailing a well-respected politician, who just happened to rape 10-year-olds in his spare time.

During his teenage years, Rennes developed a close friendship with underworld czar Louis Bouchard. The latter bought Rennes this pawnbroker shop as a front for provision of illegal documentation and currency. In his early twenties, Rennes became insanely paranoid about conspiracy theories and rigged the place with booby traps. The man was now a master forger, printer and archivist, often needed by Bouchard and other big shots of the Parisian underground.

Rennes looked up from the magazine, hearing the familiar sound of the front door opening. Steps sounded from the hall as someone walked quickly towards the shop. The brown-haired biker from Café Metro appeared in the doorway.

"Ah, mr. Trent. Got something to trade again?" Rennes said. He only knew the man's name – Kurtis Trent – and didn't need or want to know any more. Trent had first entered the shop about a week ago and had since then showed up every other day, pawning various valuable jewellery, probably snatched from passers-by in the more crowded districts a few miles from here.

Trent nodded and walked up to the pawnbroker. "Yeah, I thought I'd fetch a good price for this," he said and dropped a distinguished necklace on the porno magazine lying on the counter.

"Here," Rennes mumbled and paid the man 195 Euros.

"Thanks. By the way, you wouldn't happen to have any spare hardware parts? I'm thinking about constructing a pistol of my own."

"No, this is just a pawnshop," the owner lied. Trent seemed a little too suspicious for the ever paranoid Rennes to trust.

"You're sure you don't sell any firepower?"

Rennes shook his head.

"Okay, I'll find some other dealer ..." Trent left the shop and Rennes heard him speed off on the bike outside. The pawnbroker stashed the necklace away in a cardboard box for jewelry and then resumed contemplating the magazine.

Fifteen minutes later, Rennes heard the door open once more, indicating he would have three customers in one day. That had to be a record.

Rennes' gaze snapped up to the doorway to find a pale Caucasian man, about 60 years old, standing in the doorway. The stranger wore an old-fashioned grey suit that could have been taken right out of a museum on the aristocracy of the 18th century. His hair was tied back in a grey knot and his wrinkled face had a sickly, yet menacing look to it. Crescent-shaped, rimless glasses rested over his dark eyes. A metallic, dark brown glove covered his right hand.

"Can I help you?" Rennes said, eyes narrowing.

The grey-haired man started walking across the room. "Yes," he said with a dull tone. The glove started giving off a ghostly, light blue glow. "Yes, you will be of help to me."


	5. Bouchard

A/N: Thanks for all your comments, it's very encouraging to read. Thought I'd warn you that things get a little morbid in this chapter. I hope you can stomach it …

Chapter 5: Bouchard

Lara walked down the Rue Dominique to the seventeenth entrance in a grey wooden wall to her left. She punched in the code 15328 and opened the door to enter a narrow courtyard. A rusty, faded red truck was parked in the middle. Lara walked up a staircase and stepped into Francine's flat.

The place had a cozy look reminiscent of Carvier's home, although the art wasn't nearly as exquisite. Lara walked past a cloth-covered dinner table and greeted the owner standing leaned against a china cabinet at the back. Francine was a tanned brunette with bright green eyes and coal-black clothes. Lara couldn't quite comprehend how this woman and Pierre had ever ended up together.

"_Bonsoir_. Pierre said to expect you. Bouchard is in the old church; you need to find the mausoleum in the churchyard. It leads down into the church basement," Francine explained.

"Is this the best way?"

"It's the only way past the Doorman," Francine referred to the vexing bodyguard who had threatened to let out the Doberman Pinscher. "Watch out for the ledges – they are dangerous," she added.

"Where isn't these days?" Lara asked, not expecting a satisfying answer.

"Welcome to Paris," Francine grinned and pointed to a large window to Lara's right. "You can reach the graveyard through there. Good luck."

"Thanks." Lara stepped through to the balcony overlooking St Aicard's cemetary, an L-shaped yard filled with gloomy crypts and lush weed. "_How can that woman stand living at a place like this?_" Lara pondered, climbing a wobbly drainpipe to the roof of Francine's home.

The view of the urban maze of backstreets right next to the beautifully Gothic church complex was spectacular to say the least. Lara regretted she hadn't brought a camera.

Suddenly, Francine's warning went into effect. The treachorously solid-looking ledge collapsed under Lara's feet as she ran across the crumbling stone and took off from the edge, sailing through the smoky rooftop air. Four storeys below, a statue of St Peter stood with outstretched arms as if ready to catch her if gravity should pull her away from life. Turning down the saint's offer for the time being, Lara grabbed a red cable and travelled about ten feet before dropping to a safe balcony.

From here, she traversed her way along another cable, descending towards the cemetary. Before dropping to the yard, Lara noticed the Doorman's infamous Doberman patrolling around the tombs.

"_God, that man was a boaster. I've seen _rats_ bigger than this cur,_" Lara thought, dropping to a mausoleum roof instead of the lawn – after all, there was no need to have a hostile dog chasing her, no matter how small and weak it looked.

She gracefully hopped across the crypt tops to reach a fenced-in area at the back corner of the L-shaped yard. A tomb with a statue of an angel and yet another mausoleum were situated inside the fence. Red vines grew on the walls, whispering softly in the breezes. The mausoleum looked slightly larger and better ornamented than the rest, leading Lara to assume this was the one Francine had mentioned.

Lara hopped into the enclosure and smirked at the bloodthirsty dog's pathetic attempts to leap over the fence. She then kicked the mausoleum door open, but didn't find any entrance to any church basement. There was nothing but dust and emptiness inside the tiny stone building. '**AMEN IN NOMINE JESU**' was carved in the back wall.

"Great," Lara said, trudging off through the shrubs and weed. She sighed and leaned back against the statue of a mournful angel holding a cross over a rectangular, one meter high grave. "_Maybe Werner's notes will help me,_" Lara thought, opening the notebook on the page where she had left off:

**Mathias Vasiley in Prague has sent me four Obscura Engravings. He kept the fifth engraving back; wants more money.**

**Deciphered the encrypted map in Vasiley's engravings. One of the Paintings is beneath the Louvre, where the latest archaeological digs are.**

"_The Louvre digs? Maybe I should check that out …_"

Her train of thought came to an abrupt halt when the statue suddenly gave behind her. Lara burst away and pivoted in time to see the angelic figure fall down on the grave, crashing the lid to pieces. "This must be my lucky day," Lara grumbled, sarcasm pervading her voice. Vandalising a cemetary was now added to her long list of crimes comitted whilst in Paris.

But as she approached the grave and looked through the broken lid, it turned out there was nothing inside. A rusty ladder led down through a hole in the bottom to a narrow basement corridor far beneath the churchyard. Flashing an apologetic look to the overturned angel, Lara climbed down through the tomb.

The slippery, damp tunnels at the bottom looked ready to collapse. Lara's only companions on her journey towards Bouchard's hideout were some obese rats lazily nibbling on her feet. The irritated woman kicked them back into the heaps of rubble and rocks from which they had crept out. "_Ugh, call Rentakill. This has got to be the absolute pits …_"

After wandering through the rodent-infested tunnels for a couple of minutes, Lara reached a brighter area with four storage cells adjacent to a wide hallway. Cardboard boxes, lockers and coffins lay everywhere in a dusty mess. A metal door was located at the end of the hallway.

The moment Lara stepped into the cell to the left of the metal door, she winced at the putrid stench attacking her nostrils. Her eyes soon fell on the source of the reek, and she instantly regretted entering the cell.

For in the far corner of the room was a man who should obviously be dead and gone, and yet still lay squirming on a filthy cot. He was a skinny caucasian man in his late thirties, wearing black socks and blue jeans. The ribs pressing up under the skin of his bare upper body indicated that he hadn't eaten for days. The torso was severely mangled and his entire left forearm missing.

The most disgusting part was undoubtedly the gleamy, grey slime that seemed to grow out from his wounds, slowly spreading across his pale skin. The mercury-like mass had already glued his left arm and torso together and was now sliding towards his bottom lip. The man tried to rise from his deathbed, but the goo growing on his limbs pinned him to the gross mattress. He let out an inarticulate moan and fell back down into a pool of his own saliva, blood and faeces.

Filled with both pity and nausea, Lara recoiled out of the cell and slumped to her knees. Her breathing came out in ragged gasps and her stomach felt like someone was whirling her bowels around with a whisk. "_Think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts,_" an earnest voice droned in her mind as she struggled to keep the vomit down.

After two minutes of thinking happy thoughts, Lara shakily stood and opened the metal door to Bouchard's messy office. It was a dusty room illuminated by a single bulb hanging from the cracked ceiling. A few skinny kittens slumbered next to a heap of cardboard boxes in the far right corner. The occupant was a stout 50-year-old with dark brown hair slowly receding from his thick head. He wore a reddish brown leather jacket over a green chequered shirt. When Lara entered the room, he was sitting in a shabby armchair, lighting a cigar. He swiftly got up to greet his uninvited guest.

"What happened to your man in the room out there, Bouchard?" Lara asked.

"To Arnaud? You've got something to say about that?" he said, displaying a dark yellow set of teeth that had clearly been discoloured by years of smoking. His voice sounded low and hoarse, supplementing his air of authority.

"Maybe," Lara said. "It might be linked to what happened to a friend of mine."

Bouchard shook his head. "I doubt it. Get out of here."

"Do you know the name Eckhardt?"

"Never heard of him."

"Okay … You helped a friend of mine a while back. Werner Von Croy."

"Names don't mean a lot here," the kingpin said. "Even real ones. What did he want?"

"Maps and information, on the Louvre," Lara guessed.

"I remember. Four weeks ago … Wanted to take a coach load of Japanese tourists to see the Mona Lisa."

Lara's hands curled up to form fists. "I lost that friend yesterday, Bouchard. Don't jerk me around."

"You better watch your mouth, lady."

"I'll watch nothing. I'm sick of your Parisian lowlife ways; I need results!"

"Careful, vixen. You don't need things to get any worse."

"And how will that happen? You'll set these pussycats on me, right?"

"Wrong. I'll take care of this myself. Welcome to Paris," Bouchard growled, producing a 9mm from his coat pocket and taking aim at Lara's chest.

Lara's foot immediately shot up and kicked the pistol out of Bouchard's grip. The gun flew across the room and landed in a box of cigars. Lara then pulled out her own M-V9 and shoved the muzzle against Bouchard's right eye. The blue orb's lid was clenched shut under the pressure of the cold steel. "Cut the bullshit and tell me what Von Croy was up to!"

"He wanted access to the archaeological digs inside the Louvre. I gave him a contact. You want the same?"

"And more. I need 9mm protection, backpack, plastic explosive, stun packs … Paris isn't safe these days," Lara said, slowly withdrawing her pistol from Bouchard's face.

"Who for?" Bouchard asked. "You can obviously take care of yourself."

"Do you have what I need?"

"I know who does. Daniel Rennes. Works out of the pawnbrokers on the corner of Rue St. Mark and Cours la Seine."

Lara recalled the messy shop where she had pawned the diamond ring. "A front, obviously."

Bouchard nodded. "Rennes needs careful handling. But he can get you what you need, if you know how to make the right approach."

"What would you suggest?"

"A trade. I have to get certain things into his hands. Passports. You could deliver them for me."

"Passports!" Lara exclaimed.

"Czech passports; nothing to dirty your hands with. It's a business arrangement."

"For which he would give me what I need?"

"For the right price. The passports will prove you come through me," Bouchard said.

"What happened to your man in the sickroom back there?" Lara shuddered. "Was he delivering packages for you, too?"

"Poor Arnaud," Bouchard shook his head slowly. "One of my toughest. The only survivor of four attacks so far."

"Attacks? By who?"

"An interesting question. We don't know for sure, yet," Bouchard said as he started rummaging through a cardboard box inside one of the lockers.

"The Paris Monstrum perhaps," Lara remarked.

Bouchard winced slightly at hearing the serial killer's nickname. "We're looking into that. You should take care."

"An automatic would help. You sold my friend Von Croy some hardware, and I need the same."

"That was then. We need all the firepower we can get. Rennes is your man," Bouchard said as he pulled a wad of fake passports out of the box. "Is it a deal?"

"OK. Deal."

"Make sure Rennes gets this," Bouchard handed Lara the passports. "And be sure it _is_ Rennes."

"Why? Who else could it be?" Lara asked, tucking the wad into her pocket.

"I'd like to ask poor Arnaud that," Bouchard sighed. "But he can't talk anymore. Just take care."

---

Lara followed a spiral staircase up from the basement to St. Aicard's church, which had apparently been turned into a gym. A tall statue of Jesus Christ loomed behind the altar, watching two muscular guys fight in the boxing ring in the middle of the hall. Lara stole out of the church and made her way back to the Cours la Seine. The ghetto district was still abandoned like a ghost town. "Hey, did you find Bouchard?" Janice said as Lara passed by.

"Yeah. Didn't tell me much, but I think I'm on the right track," Lara replied and proceeded down the street, entering Rennes' pawnshop on her right.

The narrow hall was pervaded by the same stink of death and decay that had settled in Arnaud's sickroom like a thick fog. Lara slowly prowled down the corridor. A pale, 60-year-old man suddenly stepped out from the shop to her left. He wore an old-fashioned grey suit and crescent-shaped glasses.

As the strange man marched down the hallway, his broad right shoulder bumped against Lara. He shot her a brief, menacing look that seemed to pierce right into her soul. Lara shivered and looked down to catch a glimpse of scarlet blood dripping from his right hand, which was also covered by a brownish, metallic glove.

Then, the man stepped out the door behind Lara and walked down the street. The afternoon wind soon blew the door shut, rendering the stale reek of the pawnshop undisturbed by any healthy fresh air. "_Who was that guy?_" Lara pondered, walking down the corridor and into the shop he had emerged from.

The place looked even more decrepit and messy than Lara remembered it from her last visit. Furniture and other pawned items had been roughly shoved aside to clear a path from the entrance to the counter. Even the chandelier swinging back and forth under the ceiling was bent out of shape. A large section of the counter had been crushed to rubble. The door behind the counter had somehow been torn off its hinges. "_What the hell happened to this place? Looks like a little tornado whirled right through the shop,_" Lara observed as she walked past the cleaved counter and through the doorway to the owner's back room.

Daniel Rennes lay at the wall, his glazed eyes locked onto the ceiling. A circular, occult-looking symbol had been daubed on the wooden floor with the victim's own blood. His face was contorted in an expression of pure terror, and his torso looked like someone had simply reached in there and ripped the intestines out. An orange mix of blood and urine pooled from the corpse.

"_So he's the nineteenth Monstrum victim … Did that old man in the hall have something to do with this?_" Lara briefly considered rushing back to the street to find the strange guy, but he'd probably be over the hills and far away by now. Shielding her nose with her left hand, Lara stooped down to take a brown leather wallet that seemed to have fallen from Rennes' pocket. Examining the wallet, she found a scrap of paper with the code 14521 scribbled on it. Lara slipped the wallet into her pocket and proceeded farther into the pawnbroker's lair.

Ominious-looking black wires ran along the walls. A steel box seated on an armchair in the far corner beeped softly and flashed red on the small screen in its top. Lara suspected it was some kind of ingenious booby trap, but she had no idea what would set it off.

Across the room, a quadratic trapdoor was situated in the floor opposite the beeping box. It looked approximately one metre wide and would be a good choice if she needed to make a fast getaway. A heavy metal door was located in the wall between the box and the trapdoor. Lara walked up to the door and punched 14521 into the number plate. The door swung open to reveal a small hardware storeroom behind it.

Maps and weapons filled the bottom shelf opposite the entrance. "_Werner obviously never had a chance to collect it,_" Lara thought and stepped into the storeroom, snatching a black backpack from the upper shelf. She then crammed the goods into the backpack – a Dart SS pistol, K2 Impactor, black hip holsters, explosives … "_It's like Christmas Eve,_" Lara grinned as she grabbed two maps of the Louvre sewers and archaeological digs and donned the present-stuffed backpack.

Suddenly, the door slammed shut in front of her and twenty laser-rays shot out from the walls, trapping her like a fly in their bright red cobweb. Lara heard the armed box to her left start to beep faster and louder. "Dammit! I must have triggered the sensor …"

She pushed a button in the left wall, and the door opened again. The panicky woman ran out, but skid to a halt when she saw even more rays guarding the exit to the pawnshop. "You've gotta be shitting me."

Lara pivoted 90 degrees and rushed to her left, ripping the hatch up from the floor. She didn't hesitate for a splitsecond before dropping into the cellar hallway beneath. Behind her, the beeping sounds stopped and were replaced by the deafening noise of a detonation.

Lara sprinted through the hallway and dropped through another hole to a round, sewer-like tunnel. The explosion roared after her and sent a billow of flames washing through the tunnel. Lara tried to ignore the menacing tongues of fire caressing her back. Clenching her eyes shut against the smoky heat, she focused all her energy on the round exit at the tunnel's end and getting to the heavenly river that shimmered beyond it. Her feet frantically pounded against the slippery ground, but suddenly there wasn't any more ground underneath them – there was only fiery air, which she fell through like the lost angel she had become …

---

Kurtis Trent sat crouched down at the edge of the river, staring at the drab buildings' reflections in the water surface twelve feet below. Fishing vessels were tied along the opposite side of the river. A family of ducks paddled across the mild waves. Kurtis lit a cigarette and let the familiar smoke drain from the white paper into his throat.

The unmistakeable boom of an exploding bomb resounded from the opposite side of the river, causing the ducks to fly off, quacking in horror. A female figure leapt out from a round tunnel opening in one of the decrepit buildings and swan-dove through the air, closely followed by a brief tidal wave of billowing flames. Vaguely intrigued, Kurtis tilted his head to let an annoying brown strand fall out of his right eye, giving him a better view of the woman landing safely on the wooden deck of a fishing vessel.

Sure enough, it was Ms. Lara Croft herself. "_God knows what she's been messing with to trigger that explosion,_" Kurtis thought as he flicked the cigarette away and stood. The cigarette whirled into the river, where the cold waters effortlessly quenched the red glow and left no trace of fire behind.

Lara slowly stood from the boat's deck and scanned both sides of the river for any witnesses to the explosion. She found none, apart from the brown-haired man on the opposite shore, whom she instantly recognized as the biker from Cours la Seine and Pierre's inquisitive customer. Lara shot him an irritated glare that seemed to say "_Who the hell are you and whose side are you on?_"

Kurtis merely gave a faint smile, walked off to his motorcycle and sped down an alley.

---

A/N: We'll get to the Cabal meeting next chapter. Until then, have a merry christmas!


	6. The Cabal and the Louvre

Chapter 6: The Cabal and the Louvre

Four grey gargoyles were perched at the wall's four cardinal points just below the dark blue dome ceiling. The ancient creatures' mouths were contorted open in silent roars. Their demonic eyes glared down at the large, round table located precisely on the centre of the hall's floor. Symmetric patterns were carved in the table's dusty wood, their intricate shapes mixing with the shadows cast by the single ornate lamp on the middle of the table. Huge, round stone pillars supported the dome ceiling. Bookshelves crammed with occult tomes and manuscripts lined the walls.

Three persons, one woman and two men, were seated in antique wooden chairs at the table. The woman was in her late fifties and had short, greying black hair. She wore shiny black gloves and a sleeveless green laboratory jacket. Her facial skin looked like it was pulled back tightly enough to rip open and expose the skull and brain any moment now.

A pale, flabby guy sat next to the woman. He wore a white hat, red scarf and bright green shirt. Round, pitchblack sunglasses rested over his twitching eyes. Stubble dotted his huge double chins, above which the man's teeth were nervously biting his thin lips.

The man to the woman's right was in his late thirties and undoubtedly the youngest of the three persons. His short hair had an almost golden tinge in the light of the antique table lamp. He wore a black suit over a grey turtleneck. "Shouldn't Eckhardt be here by now?" he asked, a strong British accent pervading his low voice.

"Actually, Master Eckhardt should have been here two minutes ago," answered a bald, muscular man standing leaned against one of the bookshelves. His accent was clearly Swedish. He wore an intimidating military uniform and had a milky-white beard growing on his weather-beaten chin.

"Thank you, Gunderson." The man leaned back and raked a hand through his bright blonde hair. "Where on earth has he got to? He's usually the first to show up at the Cabal meetings."

"Master Eckhardt has been very preoccupied lately, Karel," the black-haired woman replied. Her accent was very hard to place, but if one had to guess, it would probably be a mix of German and Argentine. "Have you not read about it in the newspapers?" she asked.

Karel uttered an eerily mirthless laughter. "Ah yes, Boaz, of course I know about his amusing little hobby as the so-called 'Monstrum'. However, I fear it is getting in the way of his _true_ work. The resurrection of the Nephilim …"

"On the contrary, Karel, we need those … p-_parts_ he has been c-collecting," the fat guy stuttered. "The Turkey specimen will require more than some simple Lux artifact to a-awaken. We'll n-n-need to …"

"What we don't _need_ is all your ridicolous nonsense, Muller. That 'simple' artifact is the most important device in our entire plan. Yes, the organs will be useful as well, but we must focus on the paintings and the Sanglyph," Karel said, getting a little exasperated. "Sometimes I really wonder why Eckhardt lets an idiot like you stay in our great alliance."

Muller kept quiet and resumed biting his lower lip. He flinced when the double doors behind him burst open and Pieter Van Eckhardt marched into the meeting hall. The fresh blood of a certain criminal pawnbroker stained the metal glove on the newly arrived Cabal master's right hand. "Apologies for my late arrival; I was _harvesting_," came the terse explanation. He walked up to a bowl of distilled water on one of the bookshelves and swiftly washed the blood off. The man then started pacing slowly around the table. "Esteemed Cabal members, the hour of your reward grows ever closer," he began.

Figuring Eckhardt was going to start off with a mere summary, Karel let his thoughts wander and gazed up at the ancient stone gargoyles under the ceiling.

"As you know, we already posses three of the Obscura paintings," Eckhardt said. "Our contact, Professor Werner Von Croy, located the fourth one for us here in Paris. When we have this, we will reassemble in Prague."

Karel's gaze flew back down to Eckhardt, interest piqued.

Eckhardt glared over his crescent-shaped glasses at the three powerful individuals seated in front of him. "It is time to awaken the _Sleeper_."

A quiet gasp escaped Boaz' mouth. Muller's teeth sunk even deeper into his chapped lip. Only Karel remained perfectly calm.

"Hopefully, we will be more succesful this time," Eckhardt grumbled. "We are also closer to the fifth and last Obscura painting in Prague. We will gather at the Strahov. Gunderson."

The tall, military-looking man stepped forward from the bookshelf he had been leaning against. "Master Eckhardt."

Eckhardt laid his gloved hand on Gunderson's broad shoulder. "Dispatch your team for the fourth painting," he commanded.

"Immediately!"

---

The fuel tank room was an rectangular hall with a deep pool of dark water surrounded by a metal walkway. A strong smell of oil and sewage wafted around. Lara gingerly followed the walkway up to a huge tank next to two rusty barrels and a valve. She had spent the last half hour exploring these disgusting storm drains beneath the Louvre and was glad to have finally reached the exit. She produced the plastic explosive from her backpack, attached it to the tank and set the timer off – five seconds and counting.

"_Dive, girl, dive …_"

Lara took a deep breath before back-flipping from the platform and plunging into the warm, thick waters. Above her, the timer reached 0 and the tank exploded like a huge orange flower unfolding its fiery petals of destruction.

The pool surface was covered in burning fuel, making it impossible for the woman below to surface without immediately perishing in the flames. Lara inwardly cursed and swam to her left, through a little maze of round tunnels. After holding her breath for half a minute, Lara surfaced in a sloping sewer tunnel which she followed upwards and back to the tank hall. The pool surface had been transformed into one huge yellow rectangle of flames.

Lara climbed a few ladders and followed the walkway back to the heavily sooted hole where the fuel tank used to be. Entering through the smoky entrance, she found herself in a large basement hall with double doors at the far left corner. '**Musée du Louvre**' was engraved on the plate. Lara smiled and stepped through to a rising marble-staircase. "_Well, at least it's clean in here._"

The awe-inspiring museum did indeed make a sharp contrast to the filthy sewers Lara had just exited. The ochreus walls looked spotlessly clean, almost even sterile.

On her way up the stairs, Lara saw a single guard standing with his back to her on the wide landing. She produced her non-lethal Dart SS and fired the noiseless gun. The tranquilizer dart effortlessly pierced the white fabric of the uniform shirt-sleeve and plunged into the man's upper arm. As the poison spread through his veins, the guard grunted and reeled for two seconds before collapsing. He'd probably stay unconscious for at least half an hour.

His attacker glanced down at her Dart SS pistol with an amused smirk. "_Thank you, Daniel Rennes._"

Lara continued up the staircase, slipping past a search beam sweeping back and forth from a motion camera under the ceiling. She soon reached the gallery for ancient stone figurines, where several security cameras were placed at the top of the marble walls. Lara knew they weren't genuine, though – they were merely there to scare visitors away from touching the art. No, the real dangers here were the ubiquitous laser tripwires. Just one rash movement, one broken red ray, and the alarm would go off, huge iron grating falling down in front of the exits to trap the trespasser inside. Fortunately, Lara was far more agile than your average clumsy burglar. She hopped across the tops of the display cases, easily dodging the numerous laser traps.

The next room was an immense gallery for the Italian masterpieces. Oil paintings covered the 9-meter-high walls. The polished parquet floor reflected the star-filled night sky visible through the large windows in the majestically vaulted ceiling above. "_Ah, la Grande Galerie. I love this place._"

Lara got on her hands and knees and crawled under two lasers crossing the entrance in a bright red X. Once inside the gallery itself, she scrambled to her feet and slipped into the shadows behind a pillar, where she couldn't be spotted by the guard farther down the hall. She quietly produced the Dart SS and aimed through the vertical lasers lined up between the pillar and wall to her left. The dart penetrated the man's neck and injected its anaestethic. The man pivoted and staggered angrily towards Lara, but only managed to take a few shaky steps before falling to the floor in a groaning heap.

Lara side-stepped between the vertical lasers and crept up to the slumbering guard like a vulture to a carcass. Searching his pockets, she snatched some batteries for her K2 Impactor and a low security pass for the Mona Lisa alarm system. Lara tucked the stolen goods into the pockets of her dark green camouflage trousers and walked on down the gallery to a small vestibule. The double doors in the far left corner caught her interest. According to the sign next to them, this was the entrance to her destination - the archaeological digs.

Of course, it was locked. "Great," Lara sighed and opened Werner's notebook in hope of finding a good clue.

**Carvier says she has a security pass for the digs in her office.**

Lara replaced the notebook in her backpack and pulled out Rennes' map of the Louvre. To find the office wing, she'd have to go through the ventilation ducts. "_This is just like VCI headquarters … except Zip isn't here to guide me this time._"

Lara returned to the Grande Galerie and stepped through a door in the left wall to a smaller, but even more important gallery: the Mona Lisa room. It was a square hall with various 15th century oil paintings and two display cases, a large case in the middle and a smaller one in the far left corner. Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece hung in a golden frame on the middle of the left wall. A semicircle of vertical lasers surrounded the enigmatically smiling lady. If one were to touch a single ray for one splitsecond, poison gas would rise from the vent in the floor below.

A single guard paced the room, armed with the usual small taser. Lara snuck up on him from behind and threw him to the floor, punching the back of his head. She then gave the vent opening a few metres above Mona Lisa her undivided attention. "_How can I get up there without penetrating the lasers? Think, Lara …_"

That's when she spotted the control panel hidden in the corner behind the small display case. She pulled the case a few feet out of the corner and approached the panel. It consisted of some switches for the overhead lights and a vertical crack for swiping security cards – like the one Lara had picked up from the unconscious guard in Grande Galerie. "_I'll bet this thing turns off the lasers – at least temporarily. But even if I can get them disarmed, I'll have to find a way to get all the way up to the vent opening._"

Lara walked back to the middle of the room and pushed the larger display case towards Mona Lisa until some low benches prevented it from getting any closer to the famous painting. She then returned to the panel in the corner, produced her security pass and swiped it through. Behind her, the lasers vanished into thin air.

Lara immediately whirled around, dropped the security card and ran across the parquet floor, jumping up to grab the edge of the display case. The five panes of thin glass creaked under the woman's weight as she pulled up and took a running jump from the case top. For half a second, she sailed through the dry museum air before grabbing the edge of the vent duct and pulling up into the claustrophobia-inducing shaft.

"Phew! I need a vacation," Lara muttered as she crawled down the cold metal passage. In the gallery behind her, the lasers reappeared, oblivious of the trespasser who had just cheated them.

---

A/N: Happy New Year, and let's hope 2005 brings us news on TR7 …


	7. Into the Tomb

Chapter 7: Into the Tomb

The streets around the Louvre were unusually quiet and deserted this night – partly due to the icy weather, but mostly due to the fear of the Monstrum still casting its shadow over the French metropolis. Kurtis Trent was one of the few motorcyclists not scared off the streets by the serial killer rumors.

He sped down the Pont du Carrousel and continued to the double-tracked Place du Carrousel. The external wall of the Louvre's Denon wing whizzed by to his left. Reaching an opening between a café and a souvenir shop, the biker made a sharp 90 degree turn and drove into the alley. He parked behind a heap of garbage-stuffed plastic bags, where his prized bike couldn't possibly be visible from the narrow sidewalk in the distance. The man then footed it the rest of the way to his destination: a seedy dead end twenty metres from Place du Carrousel.

The layer of trash covering the floor incidentally served as camouflage for the manhole cover, making it nigh invisible to anyone not actually looking for the sewer entrance. Kurtis, however, easily spotted the disc through the malodorous mess of rubbish and grime. He brushed the cover tolerably clean with his foot before crouching down to grab the depressions.

After half a minute of fruitless exertions to pull the heavy, slippery cover up, his arms had had enough and his fingers were starting to go numb. "Oh, fuck it," he mumbled.

Kurtis stood from the filthy alley floor and reached his right palm out above the cover. This way of moving the stubborn plate would, in lieu of muscles, require mental strength. He was used to moving doors and windows like this, but lifting a circular object was new to his telekinetic repertoire. The man closed his eyes and remembered the Latin mantras his father had taught him.

"_Vires. Maxima vires._"

As he stood in the alley, concentrating all psychic energy on the manhole cover, he completely forgot about the rest of his surroundings. The earth could have quaked and he wouldn't have noticed at all.

"_Levitatis!_"

The manhole cover rose out of the hole and flew two metres sideways until it hit the brick wall and clanked to the ground. Kurtis' outstretched hand fell limply to his side and he slumped to his knees, gasping in agony. The few seconds just after moving a new kind of heavy object were always painful, but the headache wore off as quickly as it had gushed forth. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, stood and glared into the manhole.

The fall to the tunnel below looked perfectly safe. From there it should be a 45 minute walk through the labyrinth of sewers to the west end of the Louvre, where his recently purchased plastic explosives would help him get inside the museum. Kurtis produced a flashlight and dropped into the sewer.

---

Lara's footsteps echoed through the dark, narrow corridor of the lab wing. A strong smell of gypsum and linseed oil wafted out from the restoration-workrooms to her right. The door to Carvier's office was located at the end of the hall, but Lara didn't have the code for the number plate.

She entered a security office through a steel door. The room had numerous file cabinets lined up against the right wall and four desks buried in paper work at the left wall. A round doorway with two D-shaped glass doors was located in the middle of the far wall. Beyond it, a single guard stood in front of several monitor screens, keeping an eye on the recordings of the few security cameras that weren't just put up around the museum to intimidate tourists from fiddling with paintings.

The panes noiselessly slid away as Lara approached them, and the security guard never knew what hit him when the tranquilizer dart pierced the back of his neck. Lara holstered the Dart SS and stepped over the unconscious man sprawled on the floor. It didn't take long to spot the monitor she was interested in. The reddish-toned screen gave her a bird's eye view of the late professor's room.

"_Well, Mademoiselle keeps a tidy office,_" Lara thought as she used the control panel to zoom in on the mahogany desk opposite the entrance. The computer was still turned on and an Internet Explorer window open, but Lara couldn't make out the site. A scrap of paper was posted on the upper corner of the computer, the numbers '**14639**' scrawled across it.

Lara pivoted, left the security office and walked back down the hall to Carvier's office door. She quickly punched in the code and grinned when the door automatically swung open. "_Bingo. Time to snoop around._"

Lara walked up to the desk she had seen through the security monitor. Dust whirled up from the old wood as she pulled out drawers and opened cabinets, rummaging through piles of books and documents. In the lower right cabinet of the desk, she finally found Carvier's high level security pass and tucked the card into her pocket.

She briefly skimmed the internet site on Carvier's computer, '**shadowwhistories.pr**'. Written in academic English, it contained information on Brother Obscura, the artist and Lux Veritatis monk who painted over the original images of the Obscura paintings. Apparently, he was ordered to disguise the "Black Alchemist"'s paintings with religious imagery. Then, the five paintings were hidden. But he made secret copies of them – sketches – and hid them, too. They became known as the Obscura engravings.

"_So that's the engravings Werner mentioned in his notebook – the ones he could buy from that Mathias Vasiley guy in Prague,_" Lara thought. This whole affair was starting to get complicated.

A print of an Obscure painting hung above the fireplace to the left of the desk. The painting depicted a traditional Roman crucifixion in the foreground and a twilight landscape of dark green hills in the background. An ominous, fortified city loomed in the horizon. Lara read the caption, written on a piece of cardboard in Carvier's handwriting:

**OBSCURA PAINTINGS – These five images were painted on thick wooden bases, much like Russian icons. They were created by the Black Alchemist Pieter Van Eckhardt in the 13- or 1400's. Together, the paintings hide an alchemic artifact called the Sanglyph, also known as the Blood Sign. **

"_I wonder what that does?_"

**The paintings were seized by the Lux Veritatis, painted over with religious imagery and hidden. It is also rumored that each painting has a metallic symbol of power built into it.**

"_So that's why Eckhardt wants the paintings,_" Lara guessed. She cast the Obscura print one last fascinated glance and then walked up to a worktable next to the open door. The documents on the table had details about the Obscura engravings. It said that all five contained encrypted maps of an Obscura painting's secret location. "_Now _that_ could be useful._"

A few notes on alchemy were also scattered on the table. According to Carvier's research, alchemy was the first real science in Europe. Alchemists claimed they could change all matter, like metals into other metals. The alchemist's "Tree of Matter" was in fact an early form of the periodic table itself.

As much as Lara wanted to stay and examine the rest of the professor's notes, she had other, more important reasons for visiting the Louvre by night. She hurried out of the office and down the hall, unlocking the door at the other end with her security pass.

After making her way down a stairwell, another hall and a sculpture gallery, Lara found herself back in the awe-inspiring Grande Galerie. She walked across the vestibule and swiped her security pass at the double doors to the archaeological dig. They swung open, revealing another wide marble-staircase on the other side. Lara took two steps at a time and soon reached the basement at the bottom.

The floor and walls looked older here, made of crumbling stones. Various wooden boxes and barrels were placed haphazardly around the storerooms. Lara soon found the entrance to the dig site beneath the Grande Galerie. "Bugger. If only I had telekinetic powers," Lara muttered as she strained muscles to push the heavy steel doors open.

The immense hall on the other side was lit by numerous bright projectors casting their beams on the sandy ground. Shovels and cranes were seated motionless all around the metal fence surrounding the huge excavation in the middle. Lara had been wise to visit the dig at night, since the place would undoubtedly be crawling with Louvre's archaeologists in the daytime.

The crescent-shaped excavation went about five storeys down, wooden scaffolding and ladders lining the sides. A rocky bridge arched upwards between the edges of the pit, leading straight across to the other side, but the fence prevented Lara from stepping out on it.

In the far side of the pit, on the highest storey below the top edge, a brown disc covered with symbols was set in the vertical wall. It spun around at a fast, continual speed. In the horizontal ground above the wheel, a larger, circular bronze plate rested in the middle of the rocky surface. Lara had a feeling the spinning disc was some kind of ancient lock, and once she had cracked the code to unlock it, the horizontal disc would open - revealing the entrance to the tomb.

She'd check out the camp across the pit first, though. Following the walkway around the excavation, Lara approached the row of white trailers. A security guard came running out from the nearest one, pulling out a taser. "_Arrêtez!_" he bellowed, but a few encounters with Lara's booted foot silenced him.

The trailer he had emerged from contained nothing interesting apart from a switch on the wall next to a row of generators. Lara pulled the switch to turn on the power. The air slowly became cooler due to the ventilation system kicking in, and a geo-thermal device was powered up nearby.

Lara left the trailer and continued along the walkway to the right of the pit. Some metal doors in the wall caught her eye and she pushed them open. The room on the other side had a X-ray device suspended from the ceiling above a rectangle of dark soil. Lara walked up to a table with a control panel and started moving the scanner around, contemplating its underground finds on the bluish screen on the corner of the table. Silhouettes of human bones, broken medieval shields and a templar's sword drifted across the screen.

When the machine reached the far left corner of the square of soil, Lara finally saw something that could prove useful later: a metallic symbol resembling an O with an odd T sticking up from the top. Lara clicked the button for printing the scanner screen and grabbed the warm paper from the printer, crumpling it into her pocket.

Back in the excavation hall, she turned right and entered another narrow trailer. The desks were all cluttered up with budgets, reports and photos of the dig. A terminal rose above this mess, displaying an internet article on the obscure mythical Nephilim race.

They were the cursed hybrid offspring of humans and angels, who had been expelled from Heaven. These Nephilim beings were said to be able to magically change their physical appearance, and had flourished in Turkey in early biblical times. They were now extinct, though. "_Well, you can't win 'em all …_"

It also said that the Black Alchemist, Eckhardt, made a pact with the Nephilim in Turkey, 600 years ago. In return for using his alchemic skills to help the Nephilim, he would live forever. "_I wonder if this is the same Eckhardt who hired Von Croy?_"

A paper with another newly unearthed symbol rested in the printer. This symbol was just a dot inside a circle. Lara snatched the printout and left the trailer. She walked back around the excavation until she found a break in the fence and climbed down a ladder to the scaffolding. In the opposite side of the pit, the disc was still spinning as ludicrously fast as always.

A horizontal ledge protruded just below the left end of the arched bridge. Lara took off from the railing and jumped across to the ledge. From there, she leapt onwards to the walkway before the spinning disc. The disc was actually split up in four concentric circles spinning in different directions and randomly changing speed all the time. It was almost hypnotizing to watch. But when Lara approached the disc, all four circles abruptly stopped.

Now that they were no longer in motion, Lara could make out the 64 golden symbols engraved in the bronze wheel, 16 symbols along the circumference of each circle. Four brackets were lined up along the left horizontal radius. Lara figured she had to place the right symbols in the right brackets by using the metal crank above the brackets. "_That shouldn't be too difficult._"

First, she pulled the crank until the symbols she had found in the camp above were in the two middle brackets. She used the levers farther up the walkway to lock them in place. "_Okay, only two more symbols left. Where could I find those? … Maybe Werner wrote about this in his notebook._" Lara produced the small brown book and skimmed the man's entries.

**A metallic symbol is hidden beneath the surface of each painting. Check with Carvier about X-ray facilities in the Louvre?**

**Lux Veritatis – 'Light of Truth'. A secret 12th century order of warrior monks who hid the Obscura paintings in the 1400's. Said to posses the three Periapt shards – artifacts of power, crystalline shards shaped like spearheads – 'weapons of light'?!**

**The two missing symbols are hidden close by the buttress.**

Next to that last note, Von Croy had done a rough sketch of the symbol wheel. He had also drawn two symbols – a crescent moon and a fleur-de-lis – with arrows pointing to the left and right circles of the wheel. Lara slipped the book back into her pocket and turned the crank until the moon symbol was in the outer bracket. After locking it in place with the left lever, she ran back to the wheel and cranked the final symbol into the inner bracket.

There was a deep, rusty noise from above as the horizontal trapdoor split up in numerous triangular pieces, rising from the opening like unfolding petals. "Finally," Lara breathed, made her way back to the smaller ledge and jumped up to the rock arch. By the time she reached the trapdoor, the petals had already unfolded completely to reveal a tunnel leading vertically into the unexplored depths beneath the Louvre.

"_Obscura painting, here I come._" Lara hopped off the edge and dropped into the darkness.

She landed on sandy ground. The cavern around her was illuminated by bright beams coming from holes in the ceiling, but the walls also seemed to be giving off a green glow. The smell of dust pestered her nostrils as she walked on through the caves. "_Why is 14th century air always so stale?_"

Lara soon reached an opening at the end of the passage. Beyond it was a truly breathtaking view. It looked like she was at the top of an immense, cylindrical hall clearly built by humans, with walls made of rectangular stones that were piled up with a precision rivalling the Egyptian pyramids themselves. Chunks of collapsed balconies and bridges lay in white klits on the distant bottom. Exquisite stone gargoyles protruded from the walls. Gold-coloured butterflies fluttered around, while hordes of bats hung from the ceiling.

"Wow! This is really something!" Lara blurted out, absorbing the view. Moments like this were the reason she had become an archaeologist. She hadn't felt the thrill of exploring an ancient culture's remnants since the events in Egypt several years ago. And until now, she hadn't realized how much she'd missed it …

"_I could be right at home here. Now, how would Werner have tackled this?_"

---

A/N: Black Sinner: Yeah, it's not original at all, but that's part of what makes it so fun to write. It's a nice break from my more original stories. Besides, the game had a lot of missing dialogue and underdeveloped characters, so I'm hoping to fill in the holes here.


	8. Brother Obscura

Chapter 8: Brother Obscura

In an immense hall far beneath the Louvre, Lara dug her fingers into the crevices of the rocky ceiling and traversed across the dome with the agility and endurance of a spider. Sweatdrops fell from her forehead and whizzed through the air before splashing onto the floor's dusty stone tiles, approximately a hundred metres below the climbing archaeologist. Dirt seeped in under her nails and yellowish blisters grew on her fingers.

But no matter how tempting it seemed to just let go and follow the descent of the sweatdrops, Lara kept swinging towards the opening in the centre of the curved roof. She had spent the last half hour exploring these halls, making her way past hellish traps and tricky puzzles, and she sure as hell wouldn't give up when she was this close to the inner tomb and the Obscura painting.

After climbing through the opening, Lara back-flipped from the vertical wall and landed on the floor of a round room within the top of the dome. As she approached an iron gate to her right, the heavy plate automatically rose into a slit in the ceiling. "_Wow! These guys must have used extremely advanced technology, considering the time this was built,_" she thought and walked up a staircase behind the doorway.

The words '**CAVEAT IMPIUS**' were inscribed in the wall. Lara's Latin was a little rusty, but she translated the message to 'Unbeliever beware'. "_Beware of _what_, I wonder? Hm, I guess this 'unbeliever' here is about to find out …_"

The gate at the top of the stairway also opened when Lara approached it. Beyond it was a large room with eight finely carved pillars, four on either side, supporting the ceiling. Between the two rows of pillars, five statues of tall Lux Veritatis monks stood in a semicircle around the coffin of Brother Obscura. The coffin was suspended above the stone floor by six shorter monk statues with milky-white sceleton faces. The Gothic architecture was illuminated by lit torches jutting out from the pillars.

Lara walked across the room, eyes wide with fascination. It occurred to her that Howard Carter must have felt the same way when he discovered Tutankhamon's tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Five words were inscribed on the side of Obscura's sarcophagus-like coffin:

**ULTRA VIGILIS UMBRAM, ECCE VERITAS**

"Through the spirit of the keeper, behold the truth," Lara translated.

Suddenly, she heard an unearthly howl to her right and noticed a reddish glare through the corner of her eye. Seeing the light draw near, Lara instinctively dropped to the ground and pressed herself against the stone floor. She felt a searing heat whoosh over her back, and yet, at the same time, a chill ran through the inside of her body. The howling was now coming from her left.

Lara scrambled to her feet and turned to get a better look at her assailant. At the first glance, it was just an inexplicable light floating a few feet above the ground. But once Lara's eyes had gotten used to it, she could make out a dark, tattered monk's robe inside the crimson glare. The hood was pulled down to conceal the face, but Lara could easily guess the identity of the ghost. "_Brother Obscura …_"

The spirit swooped towards her again, but Lara jumped out of harm's way. Unfortunately, she flew right into one of the pillars, bumping painfully into the stone surface. "Fuck!" she burst out as she landed on the floor with a pounding headache. To top it all off, the ghostly guardian was already flying towards her again like an owl towards a mouse.

"_Okay, I'll just get the painting and then I'm getting the hell out of here._" Lara scanned the room and noticed that each of the tall monk statues was holding a frame for a small painting. All the frames were empty except one to Lara's right, which contained the Obscura painting itself, giving off a light blue glow. "_The Light of Truth …_"

Lara dashed for the statue, but the painting and its glow vanished in the blink of an eye as she approached. "_What the …_"

Soon, her gaze found the glowing painting held by another statue across the room. Lara ran for the image once more, and just like her first attempt had proven, the painting magically moved to another statue's hands when humans drew near. "_Why are things never easy?_"

Behind her, the monk's spirit came flying forth, uttering its usual bloodcurdling howl. Lara reached into her backpack and produced a V-Packer shotgun. She rolled to face the opposite direction and fired twice at Brother Obscura's head. The bullets flew straight through the ragged robe and plunged into the wall. The spirit kept floating towards her, but it seemed to have slowed down a little. Lara back-flipped repeatedly while emptying the V-Packer into the spectre.

Finally, Brother Obscura's howls trailed off and it came to an abrupt halt, stunned. Lara dashed up to the right statue, and this time, the painting didn't move an inch. She snatched it from the stone hands of the Lux Veritatis monk and slipped it into her backpack.

Brother Obscura howled angrily and whirled around to stop the tomb raider, but Lara had already sprinted through a doorway, and the gate was lowered behind her. Realizing it had failed to guard its painting, the spirit let out one final roar of frustration before vanishing into thin air. The robe fell to the floor in a dull heap.

---

Lara ran down the staircase and waded through a half-flooded corridor. Her military camouflage trousers were drenched in cold water, and gooseflesh spread across her bare arms. As Lara reached the end of the hallway, a minor waterfall poured down from an opening in the ceiling. The archaeologist filled her lungs with oxygen, just before the surface rose above her head and flooded the entire hallway. "_I wonder where it's all coming from - maybe these caves are connected to the Seine somewhere?_"

The archaeologist entered the hole in the ceiling, dove through a short tunnel and emerged back in the cylindrical hall with the impressive display of balconies and gargoyles. Lara floated motionless under the ceiling for a moment, staring down at the flooded tomb. The water was so incredibly clear, it could almost pass for normal air. Lara felt like she was flying – an angel without wings, flying through ruins of a forgotten past.

But like all other mortal beings, Lara needed oxygen. She tore herself away from the surreal sight and swam onwards through a passage in the ceiling. A cover blocked the square opening at the top, but Lara's half-numb hands managed to push it aside.

Her head broke the surface first. The quiet, peaceful soundscape of the underwater halls was replaced by the mechanical noises of the high-tech museum. Lara's purplish lips parted and she gasped for the dusty air of the archaeological dig.

Pulling herself out of the icy water, the archaeologist stood and walked down a rectangular, fenced-in area. She stepped onto a crate and easily jumped over the fence to reach the steel doors she had pushed open earlier. Lara returned to the museum and slipped up to the first floor, leaving watery footprints on the marble stairs.

---

A/N: Sorry that was such a short chapter, I've been having a little writer's block lately. Anyway, the Louvre siege should be coming soon. Jordana Trent: Thanks for the long review. Karel's that old? (plays game again and looks closer) Well, maybe not 40, but probably older than mid-twenties. Damn, I think I'll fix that chapter …


	9. Galleries under Siege

Chapter 9: Galleries under Siege

Marten Gunderson marched down the Grande Galerie, holding a gas mask in his right hand. The war veteran didn't pay any attention to the Italian masterpieces hanging on the walls. He had never been interested in any other art than the art of bloodshed.

Through the decades, Gunderson had fought in countless conflicts world-wide. He now ran a mercenary recruitment service simply known as "The Agency", providing specialized forces for anything from basic security to invasions. Tonight, they were working for their most powerful clients yet – Master Eckhardt and his infamous Cabal.

"Take the rear door," Gunderson spoke into his radio.

On the roof of the Louvre, two of his soldiers immediately obeyed. The men were wearing dark blue uniforms that left everything to the imagination. Their faces were concealed by black gas masks, and their gloved hands clutched the latest automatic weapons. As silent as their shadows, they snuck up to the nearest vent duct.

"Employ gas."

One of them ripped the cover aside, while the other flung a gas grenade into the opening. The canister clattered into the maze of metal shafts, spreading its green smoke through the ventilation system.

"Stay sharp. Swing to sector A9."

Two soldiers in the Salle des Etats were hanging from thick ropes under the ceiling. An ordinary security guard paced the hall below, blissfully ignorant of the infiltration. The soldiers swung 180 degrees to hang upside-down like sleeping bats. Meanwhile, the gas seeped into the hall through the vent duct above Mona Lisa.

"_Mon Dieu,_" the guard managed to breathe before collapsing into unconsciousness.

"Use double sweeps, watch the blind spots. Fan out and keep low," Gunderson commanded, entering the Salle des Etats. The soldiers slid to the floor with quick, skilled movements. "OK, maintain radio silence."

Gunderson held a small GPS system out to the soldiers. The screen displayed a ground plan of the museum building, semi-legally dowloaded from the Louvre security register. Two dots, a green one marked **C** and a red one marked **T**, blinked in different areas of the map – C at the end of the Grande Galerie and T somewhere beneath '**Toilettes Publiques Messieurs**'.

"You have your targets," Gunderson said. "Move out."

---

With a deafening crash, the plastic explosives detonated and the ceiling of the sewer collapsed. A bright yellow beam descended from the room above, illuminating the dingy sewer. Kurtis Trent switched his flashlight off and climbed through the opening.

He emerged in a deserted public toilet. Polished black and white tiles surrounded the gap in the floor. The row of mirrors reflected the man's tired visage. He walked up to the sink and splashed cold water on his face. Then, he made a beeline for the door to the gallery hallway.

Producing a 9mm semi-automatic, Kurtis pushed the door half-open and peeked out. The hallway was filled with a thick mist of dark green gas. A few security guards lay unconscious on the floor. "_Looks like they've started the party without me,_" Kurtis thought and ran down the hallway, holding his breath.

---

"_Got to find a gas mask, quick!_"

The poisonous air snapped at Lara's eyes and flooded them with warm tears while she rushed down the labyrinth of galleries. Numerous questions plagued her mind, but they could all be summed up in one sentence: "_What the fuck has happened here?_" Where was all this teargas coming from? Who the hell were these SWAT-like soldiers in the dark blue uniforms, and why were they after her?

Another commando stood guarding the door at the end of the gallery. Lara crept up behind him and wrapped her arms around his head. A loud crack echoed through the gallery as she twisted his neck around.

Lara sprinted on through the next gallery, but froze when the skylight in the middle of the high ceiling was suddenly shattered. A rope fell from the roof and a nimble commando slid down to land on the floor, aiming his Mag Vega on the woman.

"_Damn, these guys are good. But not good enough,_" Lara thought as she pulled out her K2 Impactor. The electric weapon was effective at ranges up to 21 feet. Lara squeezed the trigger, and twin probes enveloped the man's body with a bluish glow. For a second, he stood paralyzed while 50,000 volt crushed his system. Hot smoke rose from his corpse as it fell to the floor.

Lara proceeded up a stairwell, taking three steps at a time. The familiar smell of dusty plaster told her that she was back in the lab wing. Lara burst into the corridor with Carvier's office at the end. Yet another commando was patrolling the hallway, but Lara shocked him with the K2 before he could fire a single bullet.

The first workroom on the right was filled with paintings under restoration and empty frames. Lara knocked down a few easels and palettes as she rushed up to a cabinet in the back. It contained two gas masks used to protect the staff from dangerous fumes during restoration processes. Lara ripped the cabinet open and donned one of the respirators.

---

In the Grande Galerie, Gunderson stood leaned against a pillar and watched the green dot on his GPS screen. Miss Croft had proved to be a somewhat worthy opponent. During the last ten minutes, she had zapped several of The Agency's best soldiers on her way to the restoration wing. Gunderson watched the green dot move into one of the workrooms, where it paused at the back wall.

"The museum's respirators," Gunderson muttered. "Clever girl."

"She's still loose," he spoke into his radio. "Take her out."

---

Lara ran down a 20 feet wide staircase and through another hallway. All these corridors and galleries were so very much alike, and she didn't have time to stop and study the maps. The surreal fog of teargas wasn't making things less bewildering, either. She felt like she had been running around in circles for aeons …

"_I'm lost. Lara Croft, world-renowned archaeologist, lost in a museum. The irony's killing me._"

The bemused woman burst into a gallery with crimson walls and the usual parquet floor. To her right, long rows of display cases were lined up, containing pieces of Greek armour, shields and jars.

Suddenly, a yellow light came flying towards her. Lara barely dodged the glowing object as it flew by a few inches from her chest. She spun around, pistol at the ready, but the object's flight had already come to an abrupt halt. The flying disc was half-buried horizontally in the wall. It looked like a metallic frisbee, about three and a half inches in diameter. Silvery blades jutted out along its circumference. "_If that's the weapon … where's the wielder?_"

The building had become eerily silent now. Lara's eyes darted around as she walked backwards with slow, stealthy footsteps.

But those footsteps came to an abrupt halt when a 9mm muzzle was pressed against the back of her neck. Lara's breath caught in her throat, and she lowered her pistol with shaking hands. She tried turning her head to see the assailant. This only resulted in the muzzle being pressed harder against her neck. Lara quickly turned her head away, but she had managed to get a glimpse of pale skin and stubble, though.

"_Then it can't be one of the commandos. And all the museum guards are unconscious from the gas …_"

The man's left hand came to rest on her shoulder and slid down her gooseflesh-covered arm. It stopped at her own hand and took the pistol from her limp fingers, tossing it to the floor. Lara's initial shock and dread was replaced by frustration and a deep hatred for the unseen man frisking her. "_Who the hell does he think he is?!_"

The hand slid across her stomach and removed the Desert Ranger from her right hip holster. The gun clattered onto the polished floor next to her K2 Impactor. Now fully disarmed, Lara frowned and dug her nails into her palms.

Lastly, the strange hand opened her backpack and pulled out the Obscura painting. Lara's nails were nearly piercing the skin of her palms now. "_That's _my _painting, bastard!_"

The pistol muzzle suddenly left her neck. Lara whirled around to face the thief. Her dark brown orbs locked onto blue eyes with strands of brown, stringy hair falling into them. The pistol was shoved against her neck again, but Lara didn't feel as intimidated as before. Instead, she felt completely astonished, for the brown-haired man was the same guy she had seen in the corner of Café Metro. The biker from Cours la Seine. The man sitting by the river when she jumped out of the exploding pawnshop …

New questions filled her mind. "_What's he doing here? Whose side is he on? What does he want the Obscura painting for?_"

The stranger slowly backed away, still training the semi-automatic on the woman's chest. The razorsharp disc to Lara's right started glowing again and flew out of the wall, spinning horizontally through the air like a lethal frisbee. It whizzed onto the man's outstretched hand, his fingers sliding into five holes in the middle of the bronze disc. "_So he was the wielder …_"

"There they are – fire!" barked a male voice across the room. Lara glanced to her right and saw a bald, strongly built man – "_must be the chief commander_" - standing next to a soldier armed with a Mag Vega. The man with the flying disc spun around and ran out of harm's way. Lara's instinct told her to follow him.

The soldier obeyed Gunderson, and a deafening roar of SMG-fire tore the calm silence to shreds. Lara dashed across the room, display cases shattering behind her. She could almost feel the heat of the bullets whizzing by a few centimetres from her back …

"_Skit,_" Gunderson cursed in his native language. Both targets had gotten out of sight and fled down a hallway. "After them."

---

Numerous footsteps echoed through the Grande Galerie, as Lara and the strange man sprinted from the horde of soldiers behind them. Two locked double doors waited in the middle of the far wall. The man held out a stiff palm, as if pushing them open despite the 10-feet distance between his hand and the wooden surface.

Contrary to what common laws of physics would tell us, the doors not only opened, but actually went flying right off their hinges. "The fuck?!" Lara blurted out as she followed the apparently telekinetic man through the doorway.

The narrow room beyond only contained a huge Chinese gong, which hung on the wall next to another doorway. The man swung his weird disc up at the rope suspending the gong, and the blades swiftly cut through it. The Chinese disc fell to the marble floor and started rolling sideways, toward the doorway. The lethal frisbee returned to its wielder's hand, and he turned around to train it on Lara's throat.

The woman froze on the spot, warm blades pressing against her Adam's apple. She stared at the man with a mix of dread and anger on her face – dread because she could get decapitated there and then, anger because the assailant had taken her guns and stolen her painting.

The man gave a wry smile and ran off through the doorway. Relief washed over Lara, but she could still hear the soldiers gaining on her through the Grande Galerie. Meanwhile, the Chinese gong was slowly, but surely rolling into the corner to block the doorway. Lara slipped through, but a commando behind her wasn't so lucky. Pinned between the gong and the doorframe, his ribcage was crushed under the immense pressure.

Gunderson walked up to the blocked doorway and glared at the thick, ancient disc of bronze. The artifact effectively prevented him from following his targets down the hallway beyond. "_I _hate _museums._" A deep echo rang through the galleries as Gunderson's fist connected with the gong.

---

Lara ran down the cramped hallway and turned a corner to find the strange man sitting on a steel banister. He waved slightly before letting himself fall backwards, down the stairwell. Lara dashed up to the banister and looked down in time to see him land unscathed on the bottom floor. He scrambled to his feet and vanished through a doorway. "_That was a four storey drop! How the hell did he survive?!_"

Lara rushed down the stairs, taking as many steps at a time as possible. Her booted feet clanked against the steel steps for 15 seconds, until she was only a couple of metres above the floor. She vaulted over the banister and tore along through the doorway. '**SORTIE**/**EXIT**' proclaimed the sign above.

Rain poured from the night sky hanging ominously over the desolate alley outside. The strange guy lay unconscious on the asphalt, face down in a puddle. "_Muggers._" Lara smirked and approached the man to retrieve her painting and …

-_SMACK_-

A Mag Vega connected with the back of Lara's head, and the unconscious woman collapsed to the asphalt next to Kurtis Trent. One of the Agency's commandos towered above the slumbering duo for a few seconds, admiring his handiwork.

Suddenly, his entire appearance transformed in the blink of an eye. His gas mask vanished and was replaced by a tanned face with sunglasses. His dark blue uniform turned into civilian clothes – black trousers and vest over a red sweater. Gold chains hung from his neck. He had effortlessly changed into the shape of Bouchard's Doorman.

The man slipped the Obscura painting into his pocket and sauntered down the rainy alley.

---

A/N: Yeah, I wasn't sure how to describe Lara's last movements before getting knocked cold. In the game, it kinda looked like she was about to break Kurtis' neck, but that would be pretty out-of-character - killing someone in their sleep because they frisked you? Mean!Lara. So I just left that sentence unfinished and cut it off with Karel hitting her …


	10. Moment de vérité

Chapter 10: Moment de vérité

"You okay?" a hoarse voice asked somewhere above Lara. The woman's eyelids fluttered up, and she saw a familiar Frenchman standing over her with a concerned look on his face.

"Bouchard? What are you doing here?" Lara said as she sat up on the cold asphalt. She had no idea how long she had been slumbering in the alley, but the guy who had stolen her painting was nowhere to be seen. A weird, dagger-like crystal shard lay on the spot where she'd found him laying unconscious earlier. Vaguely curious, Lara snatched the shard and stood.

"No time now," Bouchard replied to her groggy question. "Quickly!"

"Was anyone around when you got here?" Lara said while pocketing the shard, which had apparently been left behind by the telekinetic stranger.

Bouchard shook his head. "No, no one. Come on!"

Lara followed Bouchard out of the alley to a wider street. "Bouchard, I must get back to Von Croy's apartment. There's something I have to check out there," she said, remembering how the five Obscura engravings were said to contain encrypted maps of the paintings' locations. Maybe she'd find the engravings in the professor's home, or at least some kind of clue as to her next destination. Revisiting the crime scene might even lead her to remember more about the night of the murder …

"Your friend's place, of course. Where is it?" Bouchard said.

"Rue Valise, the Chantell building," Lara informed. "Do you know it?"

"My driver will." Bouchard pointed to a limo parked farther down the road. A skilled chauffeur stood next to the open door, gesturing for them to get in.

Lara and Bouchard sat down on the backseat, and the driver sped off. Glancing at Bouchard's Rolex, Lara found that it was half past midnight now. She stared out the window at the dim, distant outline of Napoleon's famous triumphal arch. "What were you doing at the Louvre?" she asked Bouchard.

"Trawling police short wave. You were attracting a lot of attention in there. I figured you might need some help."

"Thanks."

"Wouldn't you prefer somewhere safer than your friend's apartment?" Bouchard's clammy palm moved up to rest on Lara's thigh.

Ignoring his query, Lara took the groping hand, lifted it off her leg and back to its owner's lap. "I found some leads in the Louvre that may link to his death. I _have_ to check out his apartment."

"We're almost there," Bouchard grumbled. "There's something you should know. The police bands were full of details of another Monstrum killing – in Prague."

"Prague?" Lara cocked her eye at Bouchard. Von Croy had mentioned that city in his notebook. '**Mathias Vasiley in Prague has sent me four Obscura Engravings.**' "Not a dealer named Vasiley?" Lara said, putting two and two together. "Mathias Vasiley?"

"Yes. You knew him?" Bouchard asked, surprised.

"He's connected with what I need to find at Von Croy's apartment." The car was parked on Rue Valise and Lara opened the door to step onto the sidewalk. Icy rain poured over her. Bouchard made as if to get out as well, but Lara cut him off: "I need to go in alone."

"Okay, I'll wait here." Bouchard leaned back in his seat.

"Appreciate it, Bouchard." Lara pivoted and walked across the sidewalk. Bouchard watched her step into the apartment building. He then produced a Nokia from his leather-coat pocket and dialled a Parisian number.

"She's inside now," he told the man on the other end. "You can send in the Cleaner."

---

The Chantell didn't seem to have changed at all since that bleak night when Werner Von Croy died. It was still the same dark, dreary apartment building with rain constantly pounding the windows. Lara wandered down the carpeted corridor, getting an eerily profound _déjà vu_ feeling as she approached Werner's flat.

The door was thinly concealed behind yellow police tape with black letters proclaiming '**RESTREINTE ZONE**'. Lara ignored the warning, ripped the tape aside and opened the door. The yellowish glow seeped in from the corridor to light up the short hall on the other side. Lara stood on the threshold and closed her eyes, memories returning to her weary mind.

'_Afraid of uninvited guests, are we?'_

'_Y-yes. Afraid of one particular uninvited guest.'_

'_The Monstrum.'_

Lara walked through the hall and paused in the doorway. The lights in the corridor couldn't reach the next area with their yellow beams, so the flashes of lightning from outside would have to suffice. Lara stepped into the living room and scanned her messy surroundings. It hadn't changed a bit since her last visit, with the exception of the missing corpse, which now lay in a morgue a few miles from this apartment.

The office and kitchen were located to Lara's immediate left, along with a spiral staircase to the second floor. The wall to her right had occult symbols smeared all over it with the late professor's blood. Books, teacups, dried bloodstains and fragments of glass lay scattered on the floor. Most of the furniture had been broken and overturned. Definitely what the investigators would call 'signs of struggle'.

'_Take a seat, Lara. We have to talk.'_

'_I don't want to be here. You've got five minutes. Convince me I'm not wasting my time.'_

Lara walked across the living room, but froze as a glass surface crunched under her booted foot. She quickly stepped back and glared at the framed photo on the floor. It showed a 60 years old Werner Von Croy standing next to Lara at a dig site in the South African desert. The expedition had been one of their rare displays of co-operation after the Angkor Wat incident. The rain pouring in from the broken window had soaked the photo, but Lara could still make out the thrilled looks on their faces, as they stood before the entrance to an unknown tribe's ancient temple.

That photo had been taken three years before the duo's far less friendly encounter in Egypt …

Lara picked up the photo and brushed a few glass fragments off. She walked up to a sideboard, placed the photo on the dusty wooden surface and raised her gaze to meet that of her reflection in the mirror. As if on cue, a crash of thunder sounded outside, and a bright flash of lightning illuminated her brown eyes.

'_I'm tracking five Obscura paintings for a client named Eckhardt,_' _he says, leaning forward in his chair._

'_Not my problem,' she shakes her head. 'Why should I care?'_

'_Because I'm being stalked! I daren't go into the streets. People are dying out there!'_

'_Handle it, Werner.'_

'_Lara, please …'_

'_I'm going.'_

'_No, wait!'_

'_Egypt, Werner. You walked away and …_

… left me," Lara whispered, her voice full of grief. Apart from the dark days after she had fallen into the caves beneath the Great Pyramid, Lara had never felt this lonely and lost before in her entire life. Fighting back the tears, she let her mind drift back to that hellish night. "There was no pity then."

'_Get out! Get out of the way!_'

_Four gunshots ring out, but they aren't fired at Lara. Werner is aiming for a strange man who has just entered the apartment from the hall. _

"It's him," Lara mumbled out loud. "It's the man I saw leaving Rennes' pawnshop …"

_The bullets don't even slow the man down, however. He grabs Lara's left shoulder and flings her into the wall. She collapses on the Persian carpet. Unconscious._

"… he's the Monstrum …"

_The gun is knocked out of Werner's hand and lands under the dining table. The Monstrum grabs Werner's throat and effortlessly lifts him from the ground. The old, frail man's legs kick spasmodically for a few seconds, before finally hanging limp._

"… he's the client. Eckhardt."

_Werner falls to the floor, dead. Eckhardt bends over the corpse and slits the torso open to remove the intestines. He uses the blood to daub the occult symbols across the wall._

"Pieter Van Eckhardt. The Black Alchemist."

_Fifteen minutes after the killer has left the apartment, Lara awakes and stands to find Werner laying in front of the broken window across the room. She checks his pulse. Gone._

"And I was accused," Lara said, opening her eyes. "_I have to find Eckhardt. I don't know how, but I'm going to make him pay._"

She walked across the apartment, scanning for clues. Von Croy's pistol still lay on the floor below the dining table. Lara picked it up and gazed at the short range gun – a Rigg 09 with wooden handle and 9 shot magazine. It wasn't exactly the most powerful hardware ever made. "_At least it's better than nothing,_" Lara thought, having been utterly disarmed in the Louvre. She pocketed the gun and proceeded into the office.

The desks were cluttered up with books and articles on the Lux Veritatis. Lara sat down and started going through the papers. According to Von Croy's research, the Lux Veritatis were a secret offshoot of the Knights Templar, established sometime in the 12th century. Their order was dedicated to suppressing evil, especially sorcery and alchemy. It said they were responsible for destroying Eckhardt in 1445.

Lara also found a bloodstained fax from Margot Carvier: '**Dear Werner, heard from Vasiley again. He could have all five engravings. He has sent me his website address: SHADOWWHISTORIES.PR – the codeword to access the restricted area is ---**' The lower part of the paper was torn off there, but Lara didn't need that codeword at the moment.

A book on the Sanglyph rested on the desk next to the faxes. Apparently, the Sanglyph was created by the Black Alchemist in the 1400's. It was made in five metallic parts and hidden. "_Perhaps those are the symbols in the Obscura paintings. Didn't Werner write more about it in his notebook?_" Lara produced the book and read on, slowly piecing this dark history together.

**Lux Veritatis tried to suppress the Cabal from the 1300's onwards. Lux Veritatis – links to Nephilim?**

**Nephilim: Cursed offspring of angels and humans. Related prophecy: 'Through the Golden Lion, the Nephilim will enslave the sons of man and inherit the Earth.' Golden Lion Eckhardt?**

**The Sleeper or Cubiculum Nephili – literally 'sleeping cask' or 'chamber'. Thought to be the last intact specimen of the Nephilim race. Supposedly buried in Anatolia, Turkey.**

**The Sanglyph – some artifact of alchemic power? Details scarce.**

**The Lux Veritatis order possesed 'Weapons of Light', the Periapt Shards. These were looted from underground cities in ancient Turkey. The Lux Veritatis were said to have destroyed the last of the Nephilim Sleepers.**

**Called Lara again. She's agreed to come to Paris and visit me. If she doesn't help me with the paintings and Eckhardt, I don't know what I'm going to do.**

There were no more entries after that. Lara tucked the notebook back into her pocket and left the office. Following the spiral staircase next to the kitchen, she entered a large bedroom with a blue double bed. A book on the Cabal lay on a mahogany desk here. Lara sat down and leafed through the yellow pages.

The Cabal was a powerful alliance of five alchemists and sorcerers in the 13- and 1400's. Eckhardt was said to have betrayed and murdered almost all of them to control their secrets. "Now that _is_ interesting!" The Cabal and the Lux Veritatis battled constantly, even after the disappearance of the Black Alchemist in 1445.

Lara walked back down the spiral staircase to the living room. She was about to leave the flat when she spotted a walking stick on the floor in front of the circular, broken window – where she had found Von Croy's corpse.

Lara crouched down and took the thin cane. It had a golden jackal-like head at one end. Lara immediately recognized it as the head of Seth, the Lucifer-esque Egyptian god she had imprisoned at the turn of the century – only to be buried alive in the very same temple afterwards. "_I can't believe he kept that walking stick …_"

Today, the physical form of Seth is simply called the "Seth animal", because it is not otherwise identifiable. The nose resembles that of a camel or an ass, and some scholars think it might be some desert animal that was hunted to extinction at an early period. Others identify it with an aarvark or canine. But in truth, it doesn't look quite like any animal we know today. Lara stared into its crimson eyes and remembered how the power this animal represented had once possesed Werner.

'_My weak brother has returned to the stars, and it is I who will rule over this world once more. Come forth, so you may bow before your god before he extinguishes your worthless life._'

The sounds of a door opening and quick footsteps tore Lara out of her flashback. She jerked her head around in time to see a strange, middle-aged man running in from the hall. He wore a pitchblack military uniform, and a square of red fabric was pulled over his crown. Sunglasses and a grey goatee adorned his weather-beaten face. He clutched a sleek Viper SMG in his gloved hands.

Lara stood and produced her small Rigg 09. The Cleaner gave a triumphant grin and aimed his large automatic weapon. The woman cursed and leapt sideways before the bullets sprayed from the SMG, shattering the last remaining fragments of glass in the already broken window. Lara raised her weak pistol to train it on the rapidly moving target. This was going to be a very unfair fight …

But then again, was life ever fair to her these days?

---

A/N: Yes, I changed the tense on purpose. I thought it would be an original (albeit clumsy) way to describe major flashbacks. Oh, and that paragraph on the Seth animal was not fiction. I got it from Robert Armour's "Gods and Myths of Ancient Egypt". Excellent book by the way …


	11. The Cleaner

Chapter 11: The Cleaner

On the Chantell's third floor, the crashes of thunder were cacophonically mixing with bursts of gunfire. Lara fired four times at the man's chest, but he merely turned around and aimed the SMG at her again. "_Great, he must have some kind of bulletproof vest._" Lara jumped over the guy before the burst tore through the living room. In mid-air, she spun around and landed facing the Cleaner again.

While the contract killer pivoted to find his target, Lara emptied the magazine into his limbs. The man reeled for a second, but was soon firing the SMG once more. Lara ducked and rolled sideways. Bullets plunged into the mirror, a broad waterfall of slivers flowing to the carpet. The sideboard's wooden legs snapped, and the photo of Lara and Werner returned to the floor from whence it came.

Lara scanned the room and quickly spotted two more magazines laying on the floor next to the dining table. The woman dashed for the ammo, but was abruptly yanked back as the Cleaner grabbed her braid and flung her into the wall. Lara let out a yelp of pain and fell onto the unforgiving floor. The SMG muzzle was soon pressed against her neck. The Cleaner gave a sadistic smile and squeezed the trigger.

Click.

Even though the Viper SMG was an extraordinarily powerful weapon, it had one thing in common with all other guns – it needed ammo. The Cleaner produced another magazine and reloaded the SMG in a few skilled, swift movements.

However, that two-second pause was all the time Lara needed. She gripped one of the mirror fragments from the floor and flung it at the Cleaner. The glass plunged into the man's cheek and sent blood squirting out of the pale face.

The Cleaner sprinted out of the apartment. Lara scrambled to her feet. "_That floor was uncomfortable – damp and cold. I should complain to the concierge._" She reloaded her Rigg 09 with the ammo next to the dining table and pocketed the other magazine. She then followed the hired killer through the hall and back to the narrow, carpeted corridor.

Numerous lasers were rigged up between explosives attached to the walls to her right. If anyone touched the bright red rays, they would of course set off the explosives. The laser tripwires were undoubtedly the work of the Cleaner as well. "_He really is a professional. I'll have to take this real easy._" Lara turned to her left, ran down the corridor and through the first open apartment door. It appeared Von Croy's neighbours had been painting their flat. Old Parisian newspapers and buckets of paint were scattered across the floor. The furniture was concealed under white blankets.

Suddenly, the familiar noise of a SMG burst plagued Lara's ears. Bullet marks dotted the thin far wall of the flat, and the Cleaner pushed the oblong portion of the wall down from the other side. It seemed he had already plastered the gash on his cheek. The Parisian contract killer aimed at his target through the newly created doorway and pulled the Viper's trigger again, but the weapon had once more run out of ammo. He tossed it to the floor and pulled out two pistols instead.

Lara dove for cover behind an old loveseat. A cloud of dust rose from the cushions as bullets plunged into them. Lara instinctively grabbed the closest paint pot and hurled it over the top of the sofa. The Cleaner easily ducked, but Lara used that moment to aim and fire, frantically squeezing the trigger again and again …

The Cleaner staggered away from the gap in the wall, while Lara jammed her last magazine into the Rigg 09. She whirled around, vaulted over the couch and rushed through the jagged doorway left by the Cleaner and his SMG. Said weapon lay in the cramped hall on the other side, along with a few clips dropped by the Cleaner when he ran off.

"_Well, wouldn't want those to go to waste, now would we?" _Lara snatched the SMG, reloaded it and stuffed the rest of the clips into her pockets. Now properly armed, she ran out to the corridor, intent on finishing that assassin creep off.

More lasers were rigged up horizontally to her right. Lara lowered herself onto the floor and commando-crawled under the rays, pressing her upper body into the warm carpet. She scrambled to her feet on the other side and ran on through the hallway.

As she turned a corner, two bombs were activated in the stairwell ahead. The entire building shook, and a resonant crash echoed through the halls and homes of the Chantell. By the time Lara reached the stairwell, flames had spread along the banisters, and the few portions of the stairs that hadn't collapsed were buried under rubble.

"_Where are all the tenants?_" Lara wondered, hopping down the ruins of the staircase. "_Did that killer – or whoever hired him – actually have the whole building evacuated?_"

The second floor hall was filled with the Cleaner's trademark laser tripwires connected to explosives. A splitsecond after Lara entered the hall, three lasers were switched on behind her, blocking one end of the corridor. The Cleaner stood in the doorway at the opposite end, taking aim with his automatic weapon.

Lara held her Rigg and SMG out and dashed down the corridor, both guns blazing. The Cleaner opened fire as well, but Lara ducked into an apartment doorway and hid in the shadow before any of the bullets reached their target. She continued this routine of sprinting down the hall, leaping over the tripwires and emptying her weapons into the contract killer until she could pause in another doorway.

Having finally reached the last doorway next to the Cleaner, Lara hugged the wall and reloaded the SMG with her last ammo. Meanwhile, the Cleaner's cell phone started ringing. He momentarily lowered his gun to pull the phone out. Lara poked the muzzle around the corner of the doorway and squeezed the trigger.

Caught off his guard, the Cleaner stumbled back from the force of the headshot. His sunglasses flew off, revealing a pair of shocked grey eyes. These were not visible for long, though, as the bullets plunged through his head. Blood sprayed over his lineaments, concealing them like a bright red shroud. The man staggered back, lost balance and tumbled down the staircase to the first floor entrance hall.

His cell phone was still ringing.

Lara slowly walked to the bottom of the staircase and crouched down at the Cleaner's corpse. A stench of blood and urine invaded her nostrils. For safety's sake, she checked his pulse, but not the slightest beat came from his wrist. She then took the phone from his limp fingers and answered the call. A horribly familiar voice grated from the other end.

"Is she taken care of yet?"

Lara frowned and tightened her grip on the cell phone, resisting the urge to throw it to the floor and blast it to pieces with her SMG.

"Is she dead yet?" the man repeated his question in a nervous, impatient tone. "We have to get back to Prague."

"No, Bouchard. She isn't," Lara replied. "But your little friend is. I'll take care of you later." She tossed the phone away.

---

In the car parked outside the Chantell, Bouchard winced at the loud clatter of the Cleaner's phone skidding across the floor. The underground czar flicked his own Nokia closed and signalled for the driver to speed off. The car was soon blending in with the traffic of Champs-Elysées. A dismal moon hung over the Sacré-Coeur dome in the distance.

Bouchard leaned back in his seat and clenched his eyes shut, wishing he would wake up in a world where monsters like Eckhardt would never plague him again. Alas, no matter how nightmarish it may seem, you can never awake from reality. Bouchard sighed and opened his cell phone again, dialling a Czech number.

"The Gunderson Agency, how may I help you?" said a young secretary on the other end. Her voice sounded ridicolously sweet compared to the nature of the firm she worked for.

"I need to talk to one of your clients," Bouchard said. "Pieter Van Eckhardt."

"Not available," the secretary replied.

"_Ex hostium vi mea vis maior," _Bouchard said. The password had been chosen by Eckhardt himself. It translated as: 'The strength of my enemies empowers me.'

"Please wait," the secretary said, putting Bouchard through to his employer.

The old male voice greeted Bouchard with a question: "Is she dead?"

Bouchard hesitated, afraid. "She … I don't know what happened, Master Eckhardt. I hired the best killer in Paris, the Cleaner, but she just …"

Eckhardt could easily sense the anxiety and hopelessness in the Frenchman's voice. "You failed."

"Y-yes. Forgive me," Bouchard stuttered. "Please, accept my deepest apologies."

"I do not want apologies; I want results. You're the most powerful boss of the Parisian underworld, and a mere little worm like her slips through your filthy fingers." Eckhardt's voice conveyed anything but forgiveness. "What is the name of that grandchild of yours?"

Bouchard's breath caught in his throat. He did not like the way this conversation was developing. "H-her name's Audrey."

"Ah, yes. The adorable Audrey. She has such a pretty smile. You sent her seven pony-dolls last christmas, didn't you?"

"How the helldo you know that?!" Bouchard blurted out.

"Don't think we haven't been watching you, Bouchard." Eckhardt's voice grew sharp and cold. "The Agency has been monitoring every little second of your life, so don't even _think_ about disobeying me. Which would you prefer? Shall we shoot Audrey in her pretty face while she's playing with her little ponies? Or would you rather have us burn down her house and mutilate her parents while she's at nursery school?"

"What do you want from me?" Bouchard breathed.

"Come to Prague. We have much to discuss." Eckhardt hung up.

Bouchard pocketed his phone and stared out at the dark horizon above the Seine. He once more found himself wishing he could awake from the nightmare that had invaded his reality.

---

In the Chantell building, Lara produced a strange remote control from the Cleaner's pocket. Pressing the buttons, she disarmed the remaining bombs and lasers rigged up in the building. Two quick beeps from a car parked outside announced that she had also switched off the alarm system in the Cleaner's jeep.

Lara continued searching through the corpse's pockets and found a dark blue business card for '**Mathias Vasiley, Prague, Czech Republic / Ceská Republika**'. The symbol next to Vasiley's name piqued Lara's interest – it was exactly the same as the Lux Veritatis symbol Werner had drawn in his notebook.

"It's time I visited Prague …"

---


	12. Interlude

Chapter 12: Interlude

**Turkey, 1988**

_He's back in the desert._

_The sun has descended below the horizon, and the valleys are riddled with the dark blue shadows of twilight. In the middle of this barren landscape, a group of male figures wearing monk's cowls stand at the entrance to an underground cave. One of the figures is far younger than the rest – a pale 16-year-old staring nervously at the opening to the cavern. He's wearing a few plates of bronze armour under his cowl._

"Mi fili_," says one of the monks, Konstantin, and approaches the boy. He flashes a proud smile: "Since you were three years of age, I have trained and taught you in the battle of the Lux Veritatis. You are now ready for the most important stage of your initiation. If you fail here – physically or mentally – there will be much more at stake than a place in our order."_

_The boy shifts his gaze from the cavern to the monk's face. "What's in the cave, father?" he stutters. _

_Konstantin slowly shakes his head. "I am not allowed to tell you that. I can tell you this, however: There is one other exit from the cave, about a mile southwest of here. We will be waiting for you at that exit. If you have not emerged after three days, you will be presumed dead – either from hunger, suicide or …" He paused._

"_Or what? What's in the cave?" the boy repeats._

"_Your destiny," Konstantin says and hands his son a three feet long, medieval sword. "Use your strengths wisely."_

_The teenager takes the sword in his sweat-dripping hand and struggles not to drop the heavy weapon. Once the boy seems to have a firm grip on the sword, Konstantin hands him a lit torch to hold in his other hand._

"_Well, there is no use in merely standing here and doing nothing. _Otium est pulvinar diaboli._"_ _Konstantin begins walking towards the cavern, dragging the hesitant boy with him. The rest of the monks form a circle around the father and son, chanting in Latin. The boy freezes in the doorway, tears trickling down his pale face as he realizes that there's no way back._

_Konstantin pushes his son into the cave. The other monks quickly roll a nearby boulder sideways to block the opening._

_The boy knows he can't possibly move the boulder aside. He's trapped in the cave, utterly alone. The flame of the torch illuminates the cobweb-enveloped stalagmites. Nothing but his own ragged breathing can be heard. Nothing but darkness can be seen beyond the light of the torch. The boy starts wandering down the tunnel. _

"Lux Veritatis mecum_," he mumbles. _

_As if in reply, a hideous, sputtering voice echoes from the depths of the tunnel: "_Ken-ack akee morgu. Sheeli-kar umi-nash okee-puhr chak." _It then hisses five words vaguely resembling an English sentence: "Ssscreeeaam for meee, Veeeritaaaatisss maaaggooot_ …_"_

"Lux Veritatis mecum,_" he repeats, voice shaking with fear as he tightens his grip on the hilt._

"_Huuurrrrt the fleeeessshh, buuurn awaay ssssooooft skiiinnn _…_"_

_Something – a living creature, neither human nor animal – starts to emerge from the darkness ahead._

_-_

A noisy truck sped by outside, and Kurtis Trent was abruptly torn out of his dream. His eyelids rose over his blue orbs, and he sat up on the edge of the bed. The German motel room looked just as cheap and cramped as it had when he'd fallen asleep here. It was located a few miles to the west of the Czech border, which he'd have to cross tomorrow morning.

Kurtis stood from the bed and raked a hand through his brown hair. He looked down to find that he'd fallen asleep with his clothes on – not that he had any kind of pajamas he could have donned instead.

And, as much as he didn't want to remember the traumatic experience, he had been dreaming about his Lux Veritatis initiation again. He'd spent six hours in those Turkish caves. Six hours that would never completely stop haunting his mind, like some drug with horrible side effects that just won't leave one's body.

It had turned out that the caverns "only" contained a weak Nephilim outcast, which had already been injured by other Lux Veritatis warriors. The real Nephilim were hiding in the unknown depths far beneath the tunnel Kurtis had explored. Although, to a 16-year-old initiate, a single creature was still quite menacing.

But he knew he should be grateful to Konstantin and the other monks. Those six hours had, more than any of his father's teachings, moulded a warrior and adventurer out of the teenage boy. And if he hadn't earned those skills, Eckhardt and the Cabal would undoubtedly have found and destroyed him by now.

Kurtis sighed and walked up to the window opposite the bed. His motorcycle awaited him on the parking ground outside. '**Kromann Autobahn Motel**' read the building's neon sign, yellow letters against the black midnight sky. Kurtis watched the snowflakes twirling to the ground and let his mind drift to the goal he was intent on accomplishing in Prague: The complete destruction of the Black Alchemist.

The more he thought about it, the more hopeless it seemed. Breaking into the Strahov would be hard, finding the third Periapt shard and the last Obscura painting would be _very_ hard, and finally defeating Eckhardt would be nigh impossible.

Kurtis pulled out his Boran X and gazed at the prototype gun. He had created it himself, using various 9mm spare parts bought from weapon dealers in Paris. As he contemplated the pistol, he thought about ending it all here, avoiding the far more painful death that probably awaited him in Prague. All he had to do was to pull that trigger one last time …

"_No. You didn't go through those caverns just to choose the easy way out now,_" he reminded himself.

Holstering the Boran X, he walked back to the bed and tried to get a few hours of sleep before dawn.

-

The Municipal House is Prague's most prominent building for concerts and exhibitions of the fine arts. Situated on the site of the former Royal Court Palace, this cultural centre boasts the biggest concert hall in town - the Smetana. The hall is located in the heart of the building and is sometimes used as a ballroom.

Tonight, it was occupied by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and hundreds of the metropolis' most important citizens. The concert: _Má Vlast (My Fatherland)_ by Bedrich Smetana.

Karel sat in a secluded corner in the back. Obeying the dress code, he wore a black-and-white suit to blend in perfectly with the rest of the male audience. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, soothed by the melodies of the classical symphony. Bedrich Smetana had composed _Má Vlast_ as a tribute to various aspects of Czech nationalism. The orchestra was currently playing _The Moldau_, which used violins and oboes to musically trace the course of the Vltava River.

Joachim Karel was a corporate legal mastermind. Based in Paris, he ran several law firms and associated with most of the prominent leaders of western Europe. As Eckhardt's right-hand man, he oversaw the Cabal's investments and recruitment whilst protecting their interests worldwide. He was also responsible for bringing two powerful allies into the Cabal – Marten Gunderson and Kristina Boaz.

Karel had always despised the rest of the human race. They preached such moral concepts as 'love' and 'compassion', and yet their entire society seemed to be based on fear and hatred. It wasn't their boundless malice that sickened Karel; it was the hypocrisy with which they tried to conceal it. The way they could hide anger behind an innocent smile, or sadistic joy behind a look of pity … Of course, one could say that Karel was guilty of this deceit as well, but contrary to the fools surrounding him, he served a brilliant purpose. Once his work with the Cabal had been completed, the human race would finally receive the punishment it clearly deserved.

Although, certain humans weren't utterly useless. Bedrich Smetana, for instance.

'The Moldau' ended, and the audience instantly rose from their seats, clapping. The Smetana was filled with a deafening applause that lasted for about a minute. Afterwards, the crowd walked out to a large vestibule where they could spend the 20-minute pause before the symphony continued with _Sárka_.

Karel was walking across the hall towards the buffet tables, when his cell phone started vibrating in his pocket. He quickly pulled out the phone and answered: "_Dobrý den_?"

"Karel." Eckhardt's voice sounded weary and irritated as always.

"Master Eckhardt. I sense you have bad news?" Karel said.

"Croft escaped. Bouchard failed," came the simple explanation. "I have just persuaded him to come to Prague. He will no longer prove useful to us."

"But his organs will." Karel gave a slight smile and sipped a glass of _cervéne víno _from the buffet.

"Yes," Eckhardt concurred. "Just like Vasiley's."

"What about Trent and Croft?" Karel asked as he took a piece of bread with caviar and sprinkled lemon juice on.

"Lara Croft is a minor distraction. Nothing more," Eckhardt said. "And as for the Lux Veritatis whelp dogging my steps – what can he achieve, acting alone like a single maggot on a corpse?"

Karel remained silent, finishing the caviar and red wine.

"Nothing," Eckhardt answered his own query. "Nothing will stop me closing on the last Obscura painting."

-

The early morning air felt mercilessly cold as Dr. Grant Muller stepped out from a backdoor of the four-star Hotel Forum Praha, where he had stayed overnight. He was carrying a large black plastic bag, containing the corpse of a 17-year-old prostitute, whom Muller had spent 15 minutes of the night with. After he'd paid her, she had quickly donned her scant clothes and started to make her way out of the room.

But the girl had halted in shock when she noticed some rather shady photos lying on the doctor's desk. Of course, a girl in her line of business didn't usually mind the semi-legal activities of her fellow humans, but the photos of the Cabal's work were downright disturbing.

And highly incriminating for Dr. Muller.

"_Bože_," was the prostitute's last word, before Muller had crept up behind her and plunged a letter opener through her carotid artery.

Now, he was dragging the plastic bag containing her body across the desolate road. He soon reached a black limo parked halfway up on the sidewalk. Muller dropped the blood-dripping bag in the trunk and slammed it closed. He then sat down in the backseat and gave the Czech chaffeur a quick order: "_Strahov Complex. Rychlý._"

The limo immediately sped off towards the centre of the capital. Muller leaned his corpulent body back in the seat, watching the snowy metropolis glide by outside. In addition to heading the Botanical Research wing of the Strahov Complex, he ran research programmes for the dubious World Pharmaceuticals Commission based in Rome. His skills in bizarre gene-manipulation often came in handy for the Cabal, although Eckhardt had seemed dissatisfied with the doctor's effort – or rather, _lack_ of effort - during the last few months. To put it bluntly, Muller was getting lazy.

The doctor pulled out his cell phone and called his fellow Cabal member Kristina Boaz. Originally based in Argentina, Boaz was head of Corrective and Remedial Surgery at the Strahov Psychiatric Institute in Prague. She bore scars from a plane crash she had narrowly survived in 1987. According to some rumors, the plane had been sabotaged by Lux Veritatis warriors.

"Who is it?" came the Argentine woman's voice from the other end.

"It's Muller. You wouldn't happen to be in need of new material for your experiments?"

"What have you got?"

"Young female. Caucasian."

"Is it fresh?"

"Died last midnight."

"Perfect. Bring it to the lower Sanatorium labs."

-

_She's sitting with Von Croy in his apartment. They're facing each other in the two armchairs next to the empty fireplace. Rain pours in through the broken window, icy drops landing in her hair. The room is still messy and drenched in blood, and Von Croy is clearly dead. His limp torso has been slashed open, and the few intestines he has left are slowly falling out. His eyes have rolled up to gaze at the inside of his skull. A stench of decay emanates from his corpse._

_And yet, his mouth manages to move and form words. Lara sits hypnotized, listening to the man's rasping, earnest voice: "Humanity crouches unknowingly in the shadow of countless evils. Many forms of malevolence from the past are not dead, but wait with inhuman patience to slip into our world. And in our tainted daylight, we don't see them taking their places in our lives until it is too late."_

_Lara ponders why Von Croy is telling her this._

"_I have been sent to inform you, Lara," he replies to her thought. "You may destroy the work of Eckhardt – the awakening of the Sleeper - but one battle is not the whole war."_

"_The Sleeper?" Lara asks._

"_You will learn more about it later," Werner says. Blood seeps from the corners of his mouth, and a few rotten teeth fall out, landing on his blood-soaked shirt. "I cannot stay here. They are pulling me back …"_

"_Wait! How am I supposed to win this war you're talking about?"_

"_You will need an ally. The last warrior of the Lux Veritatis."_

_Lara frowns at the cryptic answer. "The what!"_

_Von Croy gives a slight smile. "Patience, child. He will come to you soon." The smile quickly disappears, replaced by a look of grave concern. "There are dangers, as yet unseen, that are aligned against both of you. A new world order is poised to emerge from the shadows. You must make your stand …"_

-

Lara's eyelids fluttered up, and her bleary orbs gazed at the steering wheel of the Cleaner's jeep. She sat up on the driver's seat and looked through the windshield at a backstreet in Prague. A large clock above a pharmacy ahead revealed that it was 15:30 PM and 7.72 degrees outside.

"_Another cold, dark city. Great_."

Lara had spent the night speeding across France and Germany, finally entering the Czech Republic at 07:15 AM. She had used one of Bouchard's fake passports to get past the borders – her new identity was that of a Mrs. Katharina Gutenberg, German housewife. At 8 o'clock, she had reached Prague and, not bothering to find a hotel, parked on this backstreet to sleep in the vehicle.

She left the car, walked across the snow-carpeted road and entered a newsstand. A small TV on the counter was turned on to a newscast about the Vasiley murder, but Lara couldn't understand the Czech reporter. Besides, the clerk soon changed the channel to a soccer-game.

Lara searched the shelves for an English paper and found the latest edition of London Times. It had a short article about Vasiley: '**Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, was the scene of the latest Monstrum killing today. The notorious serial killer has been terrorising Paris in recent months, but police in Prague say that all the characteristics of a typical Monstrum killing are present in the case of art-dealer Mathias Vasiley's death.**'

Lara skimmed down until she found the victim's address. She replaced the paper on the shelf and returned to the Cleaner's jeep. Rummaging through the glove compartment, she pulled out a map of Prague and found that Vasiley's home was only a few miles from here.

The tires cut grey marks through the snow as she drove towards the crime scene.

Prague, or _Praha_, was founded in the ninth century by the Premyslid dynasty. For almost 1000 years, it has been one of the great cultural centres of Europe, boasting such tourist attractions as the Charles Bridge and the Týn Church. The city is also known as "The City of a Hundred Spires", thanks to its countless church steeples and towers. However, Lara couldn't see any of those from the bleak district she was driving through.

Having reached the square before Vasiley's five-storey neo-Gothic abode, Lara stopped the car in a gateway and stepped out. The thick layer of snow crunched under her booted feet. Cold, bitter wind swept across her exposed face and arms.

"_Don't you just love this weather?_"

-

A/N: Glossary: _Mi fili: _My son. _Otium est pulvinar diaboli: _Idleness is the pillow of the Devil. _Lux Veritatis mecum: _Light of truth be with me. _Rýchly: _quickly.


	13. Monstrum crime scene

Chapter 13: Monstrum crime scene

The square was buried under a layer of pristine snow, about one and a half feet thick. Icicles hung from the elaborately carved stone-fountain in the middle. All the cars' hoods were covered under snow, save for one red vehicle parked at an alley opposite Vasiley's abode. The engine was running, warm smoke emanating from the exhaust pipe.

A short, middle-aged guy stood next to the car. He wore a light brown coat over a white shirt with black tie. His face was adorned by a slight moustache, glasses and a hat which looked like it had been taken straight out of an old Humphrey Bogart film. Lara approached the film noir-detective and asked: "What do you know about that building over there?"

"Eh … what?" The detective's voice was, unlike Bogart's, pervaded by a Czech accent.

"The one you're watching?" Lara said, referring to Vasiley's huge, neo-Gothic house. "With police tape all round it."

"The Vasiley place? It's a murder scene. I'm a reporter."

"So what happened in there?"

"Another Monstrum killing," the reporter stated what Lara already knew. "You're not from around here …"

"No. I need information – which I'd be willing to pay for." Lara produced 30 Euro and tucked the bills into the journalist's coat pocket. "I gather Vasiley was some kind of art dealer?" she continued.

"More than that," the reporter said. "He was involved with the Mafia."

"Mafia? What makes you think so?"

"Lady, I _know_ so. I've been investigating Vasiley's activities for some time."

"Tell me why he was murdered then," Lara inquired. She doubted Vasiley had ever had anything to do with Czech Mafia, but truth could sometimes be deduced from even the most ridicolously false information.

"Vasiley found something they wanted and got smudged, because he tried to hang onto it," the reporter said, his tone filled with pity. "They set the _Monstrum_ on him."

"How could you possibly know that?" Lara asked.

"Because of the way he was spread out all over the place. Messy!" the reporter eloquently commented.

"You say he found something," Lara said, not interested in the gory details of the murder itself. "Do you know what it was? A painting perhaps?"

The reporter shook his head. "I don't know about that, but he was definitely silenced. The mafia tidied away all the evidence. Took it to the Strahov."

"Now you're going to tell me what the Strahov is, aren't you?"

"_Ne_. Your credit just ran out."

Lara stuffed 15 more Euro into the reporter's pocket. "Keep talking till the money runs out."

"It's not that," the reporter explained. "This is dangerous stuff I'm telling you. I shouldn't be shooting off my mouth …"

"You're a big boy. You can handle it," Lara said in her most reassuring tone. "Tell me your name."

"Luddick. My name's Luddick."

"Okay, Luddick. What else?"

"The Strahov is the Mafia centre of operations in Prague," Luddick said. "There's been a lot of activity there recently."

"What kind of activity?"

"Blacked out cars have been arriving all week. And there was a lorry convoy shipping in crates from Turkey. Something big is going on."

Lara raised an eyebrow. "You're well informed."

"I'm a professional! It's my business! I've got dossiers on all the main players. It'll cost you …"

"OK, I'm in." Lara handed the reporter her last 25 Euro.

Luddick reached into his car, opened the glove compartment and produced a few crumpled, typewritten papers with snapshots attached.

"You call these dossiers? Yeuch!" Lara spat, regretting that she'd wasted so much cash on this scant info. She ran her eyes over the photos and noticed one of Bouchard, standing in a bland, dark room. "Do you know who that is?" she asked, pointing to the Frenchman.

Luddick shook his head. "_Ne_. He arrived yesterday."

"That's Bouchard," Lara said. "He's a Parisian gang boss. I ran into him over a … personal matter."

"Really?" Luddick said, interest piqued. "Is he Paris Mafia then?"

"No idea. Who's that?" Lara pointed at a photo of Eckhardt.

"That's Eckhardt. He's the Mafia top guy, from what I can find out, but I know less about him than the others. They're all gathered in the Strahov at the moment."

"Is that it?" Lara said, dissatisfaction in her voice. "Is that all you've got?"

"For what you're paying, you've got plenty," Luddick grumbled.

"I need to get in there, Luddick, and you're going to tell me how."

"Not without cash. The Strahov is heavily guarded. Security gates, cameras, ident scanners … But I could get an access code. I have contacts. It'll take me half an hour."

"OK. While you're on your errand, I'm going to start with Vasiley's." Lara glanced at the gloomy house at the opposite side of the square.

"Be careful in there," Luddick said. "And don't keep me waiting. It's not healthy to hang about on the streets. Especially in weather like this …"

"Stay warm." Lara crossed the square and walked down a narrow alley behind Vasiley's abode. She found a trapdoor in the middle of the snow-covered ground at the end. A sturdy-looking lock secured the trapdoor. Fortunately, a claw hammer lay on a nearby trash can. Lara picked up the tool and used it to rip the lock off. She quickly pulled the trapdoor open and dropped into the tunnel below.

The sewers reeked of sludge, rats and other unpleasantness, but at least the air was slightly warmer than the icy streets above. Lara followed the tunnel and proceeded along a sewage-filled trench. A hole had been blown in the wall farther down, grey rubble still scattered on the floor. This was undoubtedly where the Monstrum had forced its entry to the Vasiley building. Lara followed in the killer's footsteps and walked through the hole, into a dusty cellar. Two exits led out – a red, locked door in the far right corner and an open doorway in the left wall. Lara crossed the basement, stepped through the left doorway and up a short flight of stairs.

A fragrance of antique wood and 15th century canvas pervaded Vasiley's home. Lara walked stealthily through a corridor with prints of Van Gogh and Picasso hanging on the walls. Her footsteps were nigh noiseless on the polished wooden floor. The second door on her right opened into the late art dealer's study. Lara's eyes widened at the sight of a familiar Frenchman standing with his back to her at the desk.

"_Bouchard! What are you doing here?_" Lara thought and quietly pulled out her Rigg 09. She crept up behind the man and pressed the muzzle against his temple. Bouchard gasped and shot her an astonished look.

"Your luck just ran out," Lara grumbled. She drew the pistol back, then smacked it into Bouchard's face. He instantly collapsed on the floor.

Lara searched through his pockets and soon found two silvery bracelets connected by a steel chain. "_Handcuffs!_" Lara glanced at the unconscious man. "_Expecting trouble, were we?_"

She grabbed Bouchard by the armpits and dragged him across the parquet floor. A Victorian chair was located in the corner. Lara roughly lifted Bouchard and placed him in the chair, using the handcuffs to tie his right hand to a radiator.

Waiting for Bouchard to wake up, she looked at the papers on Vasiley's mahogany desk. According to one of the documents on the 'Periapt shards', they were said to be three 'weapons of light' – crystalline shards shaped like spearheads. No one was sure how they worked, but they were the only thing that could harm or weaken Eckhardt. The Lux Veritatis used all three shards to keep Eckhardt locked away in a hellish pit for 500 years. In 1945, something happened that released the Black Alchemist from the pit. The Cabal had a hand in.

Behind Lara, Bouchard regained consciousness and struggled to get up from the Victorian chair. When he saw the handcuffs on his right wrist, he groaned audibly and leaned back in the antique furniture. "Oh fuck …"

Lara pivoted and walked up to the Frenchman. "I said I'd take care of you later," she frowned. "Now, I want some answers, Bouchard. Why did you want me dead in Paris?"

"You were just a side issue," Bouchard said. "A loose end that needed tidying up."

Lara narrowed her eyes to angry slits. "Who ordered it?"

"A madman called Eckhardt. He was putting pressure on all my operations, threatened my family, killing my men … You saw one of them at the church."

Lara still remembered the miserable, mutilated guy slowly dying in the hideout cell. "Arnaud."

Bouchard nodded.

"That Eckhardt's a real psycho, huh?"

"The worst," Bouchard said. "Eckhardt is the Monstrum."

"And what, exactly, were you doing for him?"

"I had to take delivery of a painting that was in the Louvre and bring it to the Strahov, here in Prague."

"My painting!" Lara's grip tightened on her pistol. "It wasn't easy to get that out of the Louvre."

"Seems everyone's a loser," Bouchard stated.

"So why Prague?"

"Eckhardt is protected by a group based in Prague called the Cabal. They're almost as dangerous as Eckhardt, and at least as insane."

"The Cabal?" Lara said, recalling what Luddick had told her. "Not the Mafia?"

Bouchard shook his head. "They're far more sinister than the Mafia. No one even knows how old they really are, but I have seen records suggesting that they were active during the Second World War."

"Interesting," Lara commented. "I was told the Mafia ran Prague."

"The Cabal uses the Mafia as a front, to distract attention from their real activities. But they're far more dangerous and powerful."

Lara raised an eyebrow. "Dangerous enough to use the Mafia as a front!"

"Anyone too inquisitive about Cabal business simply disappears," Bouchard said.

"Like my friend Von Croy … What was his involvement in all this?"

"He was hired to locate one of the five Obscura paintings that was in the Louvre," Bouchard explained. "But he found out too much. He contacted Vasiley here in Prague, and they exchanged information."

"So, they were working together?" Lara said.

"Trading information, nothing more. Vasiley worked alone. He also kept the fifth engraving back."

Lara nodded. "I know that. But why are the engravings important?"

"Each engraving contains an encoded map of a particular painting's location," Bouchard said.

Lara put two and two together. "So one of those engravings told Von Croy where the Louvre painting was …"

"Yes, but your friend got careless. The faxes were intercepted by the Cabal. And then, Eckhardt didn't need Von Croy. He was another loose end, to be tidied up like Vasiley."

"Killed, not tidied up!" Lara yelled, exasperated. "Why does Eckhardt desecrate the bodies like that?"

"It's to disguise something he does to them." Bouchard's voice was lowered to a fearful whisper. "He takes _things_ from the bodies. Things he needs to revive the Cubiculum Nephili."

Lara remembered the info from Von Croy's notebook. "The Cubiculum Nephili - the Sleeper. Last of the extinct Nephilim race."

"You've heard of the Sleeper!" Bouchard said, surprised. "Eckhardt is insane. He thinks he can use the Sleeper to breed the extinct Nephilim back into existence."

"There's no faulting his ambition, is there?" Lara mused. "So, this fifth engraving that Vasiley kept back is the key to the last Obscura painting. I'm going to take a look around."

"It'll be well hidden," Bouchard said. "Vasiley was very cautious."

"Not cautious enough."

"The map in the last engraving shows a location called the 'Vault of Trophies'. The Vault was one of the last Lux Veritatis secret strongholds, and Eckhardt's been desperate to get into it."

Lara frowned suspiciously. "How do you know all this stuff, Bouchard?"

"Information is survival," Bouchard stated. "I survive."

"So do you know where the Vault is located?"

Bouchard shrugged. "Only that it's beneath the Strahov somewhere."

"And the painting is definitely there?"

"Eckhard thinks so. It's one of the reasons the Cabal built their stronghold there."

"I'm going to take a look around," Lara said and started walking towards the door to the apartment's main room.

"Are you going to leave me like this!" Bouchard protested, still handcuffed to the radiator.

Lara halted and looked over her shoulder. "Yes, take a break. You've been running around a lot. I'll be back with the fifth engraving." She stepped into Vasiley's library and main gallery, closing the door behind her.

Alone in the study, Bouchard muttered to himself with a completely different voice, one which Lara had never heard: "Well, that was amusing."

His right hand suddenly changed shape. It shrunk into a fluid, undiscernible lump of skin and flesh, effortlessly slipping out of the handcuff's metal bracelet. The hand then grew back to its normal size in the blink of an eye.

Bouchard stood from the chair and walked through the short hallway, down to the cellar. He stepped out on the street, grinning wryly.

"_Very amusing indeed_."

-

A/N: Hurray for Nephilim shapeshifting …


	14. Sceletons in the closet

Chapter 14: Sceletons in the closet

Lara followed the spiral staircase beneath the apartment, her booted feet noiselessly prowling down the marble steps. At the bottom, she found a bland basement study with four display cases lined up in the middle. The closest one to her right contained a yellow scrap of parchment from the 14th century. A single Latin sentence was scribbled on it: '**Tres Periapti coniuncti cum iustitiae igne mala cingunt.****_'_**

"_The three Periapts joined together burn with righteous light to confine evil_," Lara translated.

The far left display case contained a figurine of a winged, muscular being with its head bowed in melancholy. The caption read: '**Cubiculum Nephili – The Sleeper. A stone cask buried somewhere in Turkey. This is reputed to contain the last remains of the extinct Nephilim race. According to a few 15th century legends, there were originally three Sleepers, but two were destroyed by the Lux Veritatis order.**'

A fax lay in front of Vasiley's desk at the back wall. Lara walked up to the paper and picked it up to study Vasiley's message: '**Mlle Carvier, please refer to website SHADOWWHISTORIES.PR to access restricted information. Type Code 31597.**'

Behind the desk, a large abstract painting hung on the wall. White, black and reddish shapes covered the canvas. A keypad with digits was set in the wall to the right of the painting. Lara punched in the code from the fax and watched with a wry smirk as the painting slid to the left, revealing an opening in the wall behind it. A small paper with a detailed map drawn across it rested in the opening – the fifth Obscura engraving.

"_Well, that was almost_ too _easy_," Lara mused and took the engraving, running her eyes over the map. It looked like a maze of tunnels with a round vault in the middle and a rectangular hall farther up. A few Latin words were scrawled around the map, with arrows pointing to different parts of the complex: '**Obscura Pictura**', '**Foveae**', '**Lux Veritatis Bellatoris**'.

Lara tucked the engraving into her trouser pocket and walked through the study, back up the spiral staircase. The apartment's main hall was a gallery and library combined, full of paintings and epic poems from the 13- and 1400's. Alas, Lara didn't have time to examine the impressive collections. She walked across the hall and stepped through the door to the first floor study, where she'd left Bouchard handcuffed to the radiator.

"Bouchard, I found the fifth … oh, hell _no_."

The Victorian chair had been abandoned by its French occupant. The handcuffs hung empty from the radiator. Bouchard was nowhere to be seen.

"Great," Lara muttered, pulling out her Rigg 09. She crept through the room and down the short corridor with Picasso and Van Gogh prints on the walls. The wooden, painted-white door in the left wall was closed. Blood dripped from a crimson stain on the brass knob. Clutching the pistol in her right hand, Lara reached out her shaking left hand and turned the knob …

The door creaked open, and Bouchard's corpse fell out of the closet. It landed on the hallway floor with a sickening thud. Lara instinctively trained her pistol on the man's head, but all life had clearly left the body. Numerous stab wounds pervaded the Mafioso's back.

"What the hell's going on around here!" Lara yelled. She crouched down and checked his pulse, but the beat had stopped at least half an hour ago. "_That's impossible! I just talked to this guy twenty minutes ago!_"

A small key had fallen out of the man's coat pocket. Lara picked up the key and read the tag: '**CELLAR DOOR**'.

The confused woman walked down the stairway to the basement and used the key to unlock the red door. Pondering what had just happened in the building behind her, she stepped out to a wide alley and closed the door. The sky above Prague was slowly changing colour, from the afternoon's cold shade of grey to the twilight's bluish darkness. Streetlights cast a yellow light on the snow concealing the asphalt.

A familiar journalist waited at the opposite wall of the alley, reading a newspaper. Lara walked up to Luddick and noticed that he was skimming an article on the Monstrum killings, with a photo of the main suspect Lara Croft next to the small paragraphs of the Czech article. Luddick gazed up from the newspaper photo at the woman before him. "You're famous," he dryly commented.

Lara sighed. "I was framed."

"Is there a story in this for me?" Luddick said.

Lara answered with a question: "Did you get me the Strahov code?"

The reporter gave a little grin of self-satisfaction. "I told you, I'm a professional. But I want the exclusive story – events in Paris and whatever happens here."

"Done."

"This pass code will get you into the warehouse area." Luddick produced an access card with a six-digit code and handed it to Lara, who promptly buried it in the pickpocket-safe depths of her backpack. "It's only a low level pass, but at least you'll be inside the complex."

Lara nodded, "I can take it from there. Have you tried this code yourself?"

"Me?" Luddick's eyes widened with fear. "_Ne_! The place gives me the creeps. Workers have gone missing, and all kinds of spooky stuff."

"What goes on in there?" Lara said, interest piqued.

"God knows! I'd give my innards to find out. But it's way too gothic for me. If you uncover anything, give me first shot at it, eh?"

"Sure thing," Lara lied.

"I also got this," Luddick pulled out a Viper SMG and handed the silvery machine gun to Lara. "It could come in handy. The Strahov is one weird place."

"A handy machine pistol, with gas punch reloader!" Lara beamed like a little girl contemplating her presents under the Christmas tree.

"No invasion force should be without one," Luddick said.

"How much?"

"800 Euro."

"Gimme a break," Lara said, clenching her hands into fists. "How would I be carrying around that kind of money!"

Luddick hid the SMG in his coat again. "Seller's market, I'm afraid."

"I ought to just take it, you runt," Lara grumbled under her breath. "Choke on it!"

"What?"

"Nothing. Let's talk in the car."

Luddick led the way through the alley, back to the square. His red vehicle was still parked at the opposite sidewalk. He produced the key and opened the driver's seat door. "The Strahov isn't far."

-

Lara sat next to the journalist as he carefully drove down the icy streets of the Czech metropolis. The apartment facades from Vasiley's district were soon replaced by the factories and office-buildings of the industrial centre. The clock in the dashboard revealed that the time was 17:15 PM. "I found Bouchard in Vasiley's house," Lara said, for the sake of breaking the silence.

Luddick nodded. "I saw him walking out of there."

"What!" Lara burst out. "He died in that house!"

"How can you be so sure?"

"Luddick, I found his corpse in a closet," Lara said, frustrated.

"Oh. Well, maybe it was some other guy walking out. He disappeared down an alley before I could get a good look at him," Luddick admitted. "I just thought I recognized the clothes, that's all."

"When did this happen?"

"About twenty minutes before you came out from the cellar."

Lara sighed and leaned back in her seat. Luddick had sounded pretty sure he'd seen Bouchard. The woman closed her eyes, ruminating. "_Everytime I think I've figured this whole thing out, some new piece just gets added to the puzzle …_"

She opened her eyes and stared out the windshield at the mid-air dance of the snowflakes. The huge, compelling _Prazsky Hrad_ castle loomed over the distant Malá Strana. "Okay, tell me about the Cabal," Lara said. She rummaged through the papers in the glove compartment and found a photo of a blonde guy in his late thirties, sitting in a concert hall. "Who's he?"

"Joachim Karel. He goes to classical concerts in his spare time," Luddick explained. "Probably the most succesful lawyer in Europe, but also the most ruthless. He helps the Cabal with legal and financial issues."

Lara pulled out a photo of a 40 years old, black-haired woman beaming and holding a golden award. "And who's this?"

"Kristina Boaz," Luddick said, his tone fearful. "The creepiest one next to Eckhardt, if you ask me. That photo was taken ten years ago, when she won a scientific award for making great progress in the field of brain surgery. Nowadays, she runs a 'Sanatorium' somewhere beneath the Strahov."

Lara found a photo of a corpulent man in his mid-fifties, walking through what looked like an immense hothouse filled with exotic plants. "Who's the gardener?"

"Dr. Grant Muller. Heads the Botanical Research Center in the Strahov. Also does research for the World Pharmaceuticals Commission. He spends his spare time with prostitutes – both female and male – usually teenagers."

Lara shuddered. "I did _not_ need to know that."

"Sorry."

"And who's the bald-head?" Lara had pulled out a photo of Gunderson.

"Marten Gunderson, Swedish war veteran. He runs The Agency, a thinly disguised mercenary recruitment service. They're spread all over Europe, and sometimes work in the US and Asia, too."

"_So that's the commando force that chased me at the Louvre,_" Lara thought. "And these four geezers all work for Eckhardt?"

"_Ano_," Luddick nodded.

"Well, I can't wait to meet them in person."

Luddick stopped the car in front of a huge, bland warehouse with red brick walls. '**STRAHOV – Vstup zakázán** – **Parkování zakázáno**,' proclaimed the signs. "This is the Strahov," Luddick stated the obvious. He pointed to an alley next to the warehouse. "Your entrance should be down there … Are you sure you want to go in? If you ask me, it's suicide. I've never seen any trespassers make it out of the Strahov alive."

"I'm not sure I'll make it either," Lara said and opened the car door, stepping out on the cold street. "But I have to try. I … I've come too far to give up now."

"Well … good luck." Luddick's tone of voice revealed that he didn't think any amount of luck would be enough to get Lara through the Strahov unscathed.

Lara gave a slight, insecure smile. "I make my own luck."

"_Na shledanou,_" Luddick said and closed the door before speeding down the street. Lara watched the red vehicle disappear around a corner. She then walked down the alley her Czech friend had pointed at. A green metal door was located at the end. Lara swiped her security pass through and pressed the six-digit code into the keypad. The door opened, and Lara entered the warehouse.

-

A/N: Yay, I finally got to use the most beautiful phrase in the entire English language! Cellar door …

**Glossary **

'Obscura Pictura' – 'Obscura Painting/Image'

'Foveae' – 'Traps/Pitfalls'

'Bellatoris' – 'Warriors'

'Vstup zakázán' – 'No Admittance'

'Parkování zakázáno' – 'No Parking'

'Na shledanou' – 'See you later'


	15. The Strahov

Chapter 15: The Strahov

Since Lara had imagined the Strahov as a futuristic high-tech fortress, she was both disappointed and pleasantly surprised to find nothing more than a bland warehouse with red brick walls. The hall was split in two square halves by a huge wall to Lara's left, and long containers were stacked up on both sides. A magnet crane, which the Agency had recently purchased from a Czech car dump, slowly moved across the ceiling to transport the containers around the warehouse. Lara noticed that all the crates were marked: '**Turkey, Cappadocia**'.

"_Where have I heard that place mentioned before?_"

Lara started walking across the hall, but froze as a metallic noise echoed from above. She looked up at the descending crane, which was lowered onto the top crate of a stack to her right. "_I'd better catch that ride._"

Lara jumped up on a crate to her left, turned around and leapt on to the top of the container being lifted by the crane. Her sweat-dripping fingers nearly slipped off the edge of the ascending crate. A fear of heights filled her mind, but she quickly pulled up and stood on top of the moving container. The feeling of gliding along a few metres under the ceiling was vertigo-inducing.

Lara looked down at the view of the warehouse floor, as the crane led her over the wall to the left side of the building. Three Agency soldiers were patrolling the area, bluish beams sweeping around from the flashlights attached to their weapons.

"Bugger," the intruder breathed, eyes darting around for a way to avoid landing in the commandos' territory. She noticed a metal walkway to her right. Lara ran across the moving container and leapt through the stale warehouse air. With perfect timing, gravity dragged her down to land on the middle of the walkway.

"_I don't want to draw too much attention to myself._" Lara hurried to the right side of the walkway, where the soldiers below would be least likely to see her. With quick, quiet footsteps, she rushed down to the far corner of the hall and stepped through a steel door.

The narrow room beyond made a sharp contrast to the immense warehouse she had just left. Another steel door was located in the white wall to her left. Lara tried to enter the next warehouse, but the door refused to budge. The trespasser produced her security pass and swiped it through. With an affirmative beep, the door swung open.

"Thank you, Luddick," Lara muttered and walked on to the low-security area.

* * *

Dr. Grant Muller walked down the cold, sterile hallway of the Sanatorium. His footsteps on the black-and-white tiles echoed through the complex, mixing with the cacophony of screams and sobs that came from the patients' cells on both sides of the corridor. Most of the patients wore muzzles and grey suits, but the newer additions to Boaz' collection had still not gone through the initiatory procedures – shaving, electroshock, starvation in case of obesity, abortion in case of pregnancy, sterilization and, finally, the restrictive uniform, which guards had aptly nicknamed 'the cocoon'.

But unlike caterpillars, Boaz' patients would never emerge from their cocoons as beautiful butterflies. The Sanitarium, as Boaz had called it with her typical dry irony, was not designed to cure its so-called patients of psychic illnesses. It was designed to birth and nurture darkness in the human mind. Its 'treatment' was the apotheosis of sadism.

Muller had roamed these gloomy corridors many times in the past. He was used to the cries of fear from new patients, the screeches of despair from works in progress and the inhuman snarls and grunts from finished products – the patients in cocoons.

Both Muller and Boaz cared for none of the prisoners of the Sanitarium. The difference between the two Cabal members lay in the fact that, while Muller only felt vaguely disgusted by the torture around him, Boaz took great pleasure in administering it. One could describe her as a modern, female version of Dr. Joseph Mengele.

Muller finally reached the end of the hallway, where a steel door loomed in the green wall. The two Agency soldiers behind him halted, while Muller pressed his palm against the screen next to the door, waiting for the system to recognize his fingerprints. The soldiers were carrying the plastic bag containing the young prostitute's corpse, which Muller would donate for his colleague's experiments.

The door slid aside and revealed Boaz' private lab. Fluorescent tubes on the ceiling brightly lit the square room. Tables at the walls were covered under piles of articles, notebooks and neurosurgical instruments. An autopsy table was situated in the middle of the room. Kristina Boaz stood leaned against the table.

The woman looked at least 58 years old, but plastic surgery had smoothed out the wrinkles. Her face, however, still bore scars from the plane crash she had survived in 1987. She wore a tight, sleeveless lab coat. "Muller," she greeted the man, her voice as cold and sharp as a scalpel's blade.

"Boaz," Muller nodded. "I have brought you the new material."

"Good." Boaz walked up to a cabinet and produced a pair of gloves, which she slipped on in quick, skilled movements. The black latex fit her slender forarms perfectly.

The soldiers carried the bag up to the autopsy table and laid it on the cold, white porcelain. "Back to your warehouse rounds," Boaz ordered.

The soldiers obeyed and closed the steel door on their way out.

Boaz picked up scissors from a table with surgical instruments and cut the black bag open, revealing the nude corpse inside. The girl's nose and navel were adorned with silvery piercings, and her shoulder-length hair was dyed pink. "Prostitute?"

"Y-yes."

The surgeon ran her eyes over the wound in the girl's neck. Dried blood had oozed over the naked torso. "You used a blunt, thin blade, Muller. Probably a letter opener. How unprofessional." Boaz pulled out a miniature tape recorder from the pocket of her green lab coat. "Subject is caucasian, female, 16-19 years of age. Will begin by practicing lobotomy now, at 18:30 PM." In the Sanitarium, one could only keep track of the time with a watch. Neither daylight nor moonlight would ever reach the deep underground corridors and cells.

Boaz' hand hovered indecisively over the table for a second before picking up a long, sharpened instrument. "Using icepick, size 3. Fifteen centimetres long, five millimetres thick," Boaz spoke into the recorder. She then paused the tape and slipped the recorder back into her pocket. "I have always used size 2 on living subjects of this age," she informed Muller. "But maybe I should experiment with larger sizes."

Muller knew the next step of the procedure. He took a few steps backwards to keep his shirt clean.

Boaz gently took the subject's right eyelid and lifted it up from the glazed orb. She slid the icepick across the pupil and positioned it over the back of the eye socket. Then, she plunged the instrument through, into the brain. "Ah, this_ will_ work much better than size 2," she said, effortlessly moving the icepick from side to side to cut the brain tissue. "I can hardly wait to see the results on living subjects."

* * *

Lara had reached the ventilation ducts. She slowly crawled through the labyrinth, trying to slide her knees and hands over the cold metal as quietly as possible. She couldn't see the area below, but she could hear the footsteps and coughs of several Agency soldiers, along with a few growling dogs.

Lara reached the end of the duct and gazed down at a vertical shaft. She turned around and lowered herself from the edge, dropping five feet to the lower horizontal duct. The intruder stood still for a few seconds, wondering if any of the guards had been alarmed. Concluding that no one had heard her, Lara got on her hands and knees and crawled on through the duct. She soon reached a vent in the bottom of the passage and peeked through the grating at the narrow, unremarkable room below.

The woman's eyes widened at the sight of her mission's target, standing at the far wall.

Eckhardt.

The man was moving his hand over the smooth, white wall, as if drawing a circle. Lara once more speculated on the purpose of the metallic, dark brown glove on his right hand. A strange, grinding noise emanated from the gloved palm sliding over the wall. "_What the hell is he doing?_"

The door to the room burst open, and Gunderson came marching in. He hauled a familiar Czech reporter with him.

"_Luddick!_" Lara's breath caught in her throat.

The journalist struggled to escape, but Gunderson's vice-like hands subdued the man with awe-inspiring ease. The mercenary leader dragged Luddick across the room and pushed him down on a small, uncomfortable chair in the middle. "You can't keep me here," Luddick said. "My paper will miss me if I don't report in."

"Found him skulking around in the loading bay," Gunderson explained. "Must have got a pass code."

Eckhardt pivoted to glower at the man on the chair. "How very fortunate for me that you arrived just now, whoever you are." The alchemist's glare shifted to meet Gunderson's blue eyes. "Close the door on your way out, Gunderson."

The man obeyed and disappeared down the corridor outside, leaving Eckhardt alone with Luddick.

"No, wait!" Luddick protested. "I know about you, and your Mafia operations! You can't …"

"Mafia! Mafia!" Eckhardt let out a brief travesty of a laughter, the sound completely devoid of mirth. "Oh my, you are so very much out of your depth. No, what you have stumbled into is something much more, ah, _accomplished_ than those oafs." The alchemist reached up his right hand and brushed the light bulb hanging from the ceiling with his gloved fingers. Lara thought she could see a slight spark between the fingers and the bulb, as if he was actually drawing energy from the electric light.

"I have records on you, Eckhardt!" Luddick said. "You can't hurt me!"

"If only there was time for us to read them together," Eckhardt sighed. "But it's too late now. There are things to be done."

Luddick opened his mouth to reply, but only an agonized scream came out, as Eckhardt's gloved hand shot out and pressed against the reporter's chest. The unmistakeable noise of electrocution filled the room and reverberated down the vent duct where Lara sat. Luddick's body shook with convulsions and was enveloped in a sizzling, blue glow emitted by Eckhardt's glove. The stench of burning flesh seeped up through the vent and clogged Lara's nostrils. There was a loud, nauseating crack as the reporter's ribcage snapped. Clothes and skin peeled off, revealing the fragile flesh inside.

And then, on the wall Eckhardt had been sliding his hand over, blood appeared out of thin air. The crimson liquid materialized like invisible ink illuminated by heat. The blood formed a circular symbol, which Lara immediately recognized from the wall of Von Croy's apartment. "_The Monstrum's Blood Sign …_"

As Eckhardt let the lethal energy stream from his glove, his mouth dropped open as if in ecstasy. His head lolled back, and for a brief moment, his cold, narrow eyes seemed to lock onto Lara in the vent duct. The woman gasped and drew back from the opening.

The alchemist finally released his grip on Luddick, and the electrocuted man slumped down on the chair, his scream trailing off to silence. Warm smoke rose from the corpse, along with a stench of burnt flesh. Eckhardt pivoted and walked out of the room.

"_Unbelievable_. _That glove must have some kind of alchemic power._" Lara crawled on down the duct, eager to get away from the reek of Luddick's corpse.

At the end of the duct, Lara found herself peering down from under the ceiling of a wide hallway. A guard walked by below. The flashlight beam from his machine pistol swept over the large cable spools, crates and pallets that were haphazardly scattered along the walls. Lara somersaulted out of the duct and landed on the floor behind the guard. He never catched a glimpse of the intruder, as two female arms slipped around his head and snapped his neck.

Lara searched the corpse's uniform and found a high security pass. She then followed the hallway to a security office at the end. A large window allowed to spot her enemies inside the room before she unlocked the door with her security pass and burst into the office, Viper SMG blazing. One of the guards was standing at the control panel, while the other two were having lunch in a narrow lounge. Lara took care of the guard at the panel first, then filled the other two with lead before they could even stand from their chairs.

Lara stepped over the guard's body and walked up to the control panel. A plethora of buttons, switches and screens beeped up at her. One of the screens showed a small map of the entire Strahov complex. An area slightly below the Biodome, south of the Sanitarium, was marked with a large, menacing biohazard symbol. The place apparently needed '**maximum containment security**' and was riddled with guards, invisible lasers and thick steel gates. "_I wonder what needs that kind of security to keep it in?_"

Lara laid her index fingertip on the screen and traced her route through the buildings. "_Wouldn't you know it – my route goes through that 'Biodome' … It's a long way around, unless I can shut the power off to that section._"

She flicked the main power switch – "_I'll shut the whole lot down to be sure_". The security systems of the 'Biodome', 'Sanitarium' and 'Proto-Containment Area' collapsed like houses of cards. "_That's it,_" Lara walked out of the office and hurried down the hallway. "_Better get moving whilst the grid is down._"

* * *

Agency soldier #17429 stood in the observation room just outside the Proto's containment hall. A window of thick plexiglass offered a view of the immense, cylindrical area, which was bathed in a red glare from the searchlights higher up. Walkways and ladders lined the circular wall. A containment chamber was suspended in the middle of the huge cylinder – the Proto cage.

Soldier #17429 had almost forgotten his real name. When someone joined the Agency, their name would always be replaced by a random six-digit number, and soldiers would only call each other by these numbers to remain anonymous. No one wanted to know anything about their colleagues' private lives (if they even had any), and no one wanted the whole Agency to be revealed if a single soldier with too much knowledge was caught by police. #17429 had been working for the Agency for twenty years.

Suddenly, the searchlights went out, shrouding the area in darkness. 17429 cursed, his hands flying over the control panel. Apparently, someone had turned the power off in the main security office. 17429 pondered who on earth could have been stupid or treachorous enough to do that. The situation wouldn't have been so dangerous if #24451 and 23895 hadn't been out in the Proto's containment cylinder, fixing one of the vents in the lower level.

"The security system is shut down," 17429 spoke into his radio. "I have no idea why." Through the plexiglass window, he could already see the two soldiers hurrying up the ladder to the observation room's level.

"For fuck's sake, that's not my job!" 24451 said, his voice frustrated and panicky. "Why's it shut down!"

"We got lights and communication, but nothing else. Just don't panic; I'm sure we can ..."

"Don't tell me not to panic," 23895 yelled, reaching the top of the ladder. "We're like sitting ducks out here!"

The Proto's cage shook violently, and the door was ripped off its hinges. A shadow slipped out from the dark doorway, crawling towards the observation room like a cross between a rat and a wolf. Its narrow eyes were feasted on 17429 behind the window. The soldier glanced at his two comrades, who were still sprinting up the walkway, hoping to reach the safety of the observation room. The door next to the control panel was wide open.

"_But they're not going to make it,_" 17429 realized.

He swiftly pressed the button to close the door. A steel plate slid down to block the opening, saving him from the escaped Proto while condemning 23895 and 24451 to death. The two soldiers pounded on the cold, merciless surface. 17429 could hear their muffled screams: "_Lemme in! Don't let it get me_!" "_Don't leave us here, dammit! Open the door!_"

Then, a roaring shadow leapt onto 23895 and ripped his gasmask-covered head off. Blood sprayed over 24451's uniform, soaking the thick blue fabric. The soldier screamed and took aim with his automatic weapon, but before he could fire a single bullet, the shadow had pinned him to the floor and sent the pistol clattering across the walkway.

From his position in the observation room, 17429 couldn't see the mutilation of his comrade 24451. He could merely watch the spiky, deformed shadows dancing over the walls in the beam from the flashlight attached to 24451's discarded gun. And, for half a second, silence reigned.

Then 17429 winced as a fresh blood squirted across the window, and 24451 let out a final agonized screech. His assailant crawled away, climbed down the wall like a spider and slipped into a vent duct.

The Proto-Nephilim was loose.

* * *

A/N: In case you didn't know, that little procedure Boaz demonstrated is not fiction. Lobotomy was invented by the Portuguese neurosurgeon Egas Moniz in 1935, and was "perfected" one year later by the American Dr. Walter Freeman. Needless to say, it will permanently damage the patient's brain.

Anyway, thanks to my readers and reviewers for following the story thus far. If you have any suggestions for new 'extra scenes', please tell me in your reviews, because I'm starting to run out of ideas …


	16. The Biodome

Chapter 16: The Biodome

The Biodome's main research facility was an immense, six-storey high hall. Walkways and ladders lined the metallic walls, which were covered under thick green tapestries of vines and foliage. An indoor forest of exotic trees and plants – including a few man-eating ones - grew as far as the eye could see. Butterflies of countless different species and colours fluttered around, adding to the Dome's idyllic look – which was ironic, considering the alliance of twisted psychopaths running this place.

Lara was wandering down one of the highest walkways of the Dome. The air was hot and humid. She could feel perspiration seeping out in her armpits and through the black fabric of her tank top.

At the end of the walkway, she found the corpse of a mutilated gardener. He was sprawled on the floor in front of a majestic plant with a two-feet thick stem and a strange, reddish flower. A security pass lay in the man's limp hand. Lara had already found two of these cards, and she needed three to unlock a gate below. The woman reached out to grab the pass, but the plant instantly bent its stem and thrust its 'head' down, fang-like prickles protruding from the thick petals. Lara's reflexes kicked in and she drew back. The plant hissed angrily at the escaped prey. "Great," Lara muttered. "Broccoli with attitude. Where's a good weedkiller when you need one?"

As if the plant could understand the rethorical question, it hissed even louder and rose to its full two-metre height.

Lara produced her Viper SMG and gingerly held the gun out. The plant remained motionless. It seemed aware of the fact that black steel wouldn't taste as good as human flesh. While Lara pondered how Muller had created the freakish flower, she used the SMG muzzle to pull the security pass out of the corpse's hand and away from the plant's territory. Pocketing the card, she sauntered back down the walkway …

… and froze as Eckhardt's voice echoed through the hall.

"There's chaos out there! Why has the power been cut off?"

Lara crept up to the edge of the walkway and crouched down behind the railing. She stared through the bars at the elevated platform under the ceiling, six storeys above the grassy floor. Muller had been sitting at a computer there, frantically trying to get the power back on. Now, Eckhardt was storming into the Biodome. Gunderson and Karel followed their leader down the short walkway to the central platform.

"Is this your doing, Muller?" Gunderson said, turning Muller's chair around to face him.

"No." Muller rose from the chair, shaking his head. "The power's down everywhere!"

Eckhardt shot Muller an irritated glare, as if to say "we _know_ that, you idiot", then glanced back at Gunderson: "Just control things in the Dome then. Do it!" He turned to Muller again and asked: "Is everything locked down? We don't want _anything_ getting loose."

Muller nodded fearfully.

Gunderson was sitting in front of the computer, pounding the keyboard. "It's under control, Master Eckhardt."

Karel stood silently at the far edge of the platform, leaned against the railing. He watched the whole scene unfold with a calm smile on his face.

The steel doors at the other end of the walkway slid aside, and Boaz burst into the Biodome. She seemed out of breath, as if she'd had to run a long way to find her colleagues. "Master Eckhardt," she said. "We have a problem down in the Sanatorium."

"What problem, Boaz?" Eckhardt had never been too interested in the comings and goings of the Argentine surgeon's sadistic prison. "Just have the guards deal with your inmates and pets."

Under normal circumstances, Boaz would have been angry at Eckhardt for referring to her patients as simple 'inmates'. But these circumstances were far from normal, and extremely dangerous. "I have a confession to make, Master Eckhardt," she said. "I didn't destroy the Proto-Nephilim."

"The Proto!" Gunderson walked up to Boaz and loomed over her, his eyes flashing with wrath. "You _are_ kidding. Right, Boaz?" He walked on down the walkway. "I need to supervise this personally," he said and left the Biodome through the steel doors.

Eckhardt slowly turned around to face Boaz. "That experiment was to be eradicated. I expressly ordered it. It's far too dangerous to keep alive."

"I couldn't!" Boaz said. "It's half Nephilim. That makes it impossible to kill without your Periapt shard."

"You have ignored my orders for the last time, Boaz. Muller, I need the services of one of your little creations."

Muller's hands flew over the computer's keyboard, and something – a greenish-white shape – was slowly lowered from the ceiling.

Eckhardt dragged the woman up to the edge of the platform, where he grabbed her head and held her out over the railing. Boaz screamed and struggled in vain to escape. The greenish-white shape stopped its descent in front of the condemned woman. Eyes wide with horror, Lara saw that Muller's 'little creation' looked like a cross between a spider and a chrysalis. Eight insect-like legs stuck out from the pupa, wiggling hungrily. The creature hung from an organic cord connected to the ceiling.

"No, please, it wasn't my fault, I'm loyal!" Boaz whimpered. "Give me one more chance …"

"Your own incompetence has sentenced you, Boaz," Eckhardt said and pushed her over the railing.

"_Not the pod! No! NO!_" Boaz' voice trailed off to a bloodcurdling scream as she landed on the cocoon. The legs instantly pulled her into their body, muffling her scream. The pod was pulled up again and disappeared in a shadowy corner of the ceiling.

"I will be obeyed," Eckhardt hissed in the silence that followed. "Now, sort this mess out."

Lara stealthily made her way back down the walkways to the gate at the bottom level of the Dome. Although the 'pod' was probably a far more gruesome and pitiful fate than death, Lara was glad that Eckhardt had taken care of Boaz himself. "_1 down – 4 to go._"

* * *

One of those four remaining enemies was named Joachim Karel. While Lara used her three security cards to leave the main Biodome, this British Cabal member was following Eckhardt through the corridors of the Strahov fortress. '**Surveillance Office**' read the plate on a wooden door at the end of the hallway.

The two Cabal members entered and sat down in front of the countless security monitors. Each screen displayed sharp, fluid, clear images of every single part of the complex, from tiny restrooms to enormous halls.

Karel pressed a few buttons on a keyboard, and all the screens immediately showed the same footage – Strahov's main security office at 19:00 PM, earlier that day. Two guards were having lunch in the lounge, while one stood at the control panel. "The power breakdown started a few minutes after this?" Eckhardt said.

Karel nodded. As they waited for the footage to answer their questions, he thought back at Boaz' death. He was glad she would no longer be slowing down the Cabal's great work with her incompetence, but the news she had delivered were truly unsettling. Karel had always known of the Proto-Nephilim's menacing existence, but he had never thought it could escape the containment area. Even Boaz had feared that monstrosity.

In the footage on the security monitors, an armed woman burst into the office and riddled the three guards with lead in the blink of an eye. She approached the control panel and contemplated the Strahov maps for half a minute, then switched off the power and hurried out of the room.

"Lara Croft," Karel stated, a hint of surprise in his voice. "How on earth did she get into the Strahov?"

"It seems I have been underestimating Miss Croft." Eckhardt knit his brows in irritation. "She should have been killed in Paris. But due to Bouchard's mistakes, we will have to finish the job here."

The last area of the Biodome facility was a rectangular hall, considerably smaller than the main Dome, where Lara had witnessed the murder of Boaz. The intruder walked down a broad marble stairway and down a path between the Babylon-esque gardens. She soon reached a round clearing of sorts in the middle of the hall. Muller stood on the other side of an ornate fountain, his back to Lara as he contemplated the lush indoor jungle. Lara crept up behind the gardener and pressed the muzzle of her Scorpion X against his bull neck. The man calmly turned around to face her. "Don't breathe," Lara admonished, "and definitely don't move."

Muller glared at her through his small sunglasses, which resembled the round, black eyes of a mole. "You're in big trouble, whoever you are. Intruders don't last long in the Strahov." His countless chins wobbled as he spoke.

"Just answer my questions."

Muller continued to glower at her with his mole eyes.

"Fine," Lara said. "First question: Who are you? Second question: What are you and your buddies up to in here?"

"You really don't know what the Cabal is? We are the beginning of a new order of life on earth."

"Well, I've never heard of you."

"Ignorant mortal! The Cabal!" Muller hissed. "We control _everything_ here in Prague. It means that we are going to be immortal, and you are going to be dead, intruder!"

Lara raised an eyebrow. "Immortal? That _is_ impressive. How are you going to manage that?"

Muller shook his head. "I can't tell you. It's more than my life's worth."

Lara pressed the Scorpion X up against the man's forehead. "Does that help?"

It did help. "Meister Eckhardt is about to return the Nephilim race to glory," Muller informed. "For our part in that triumph, he will grant us immortality."

Lara rolled her eyes. "If I had a coconut for every time some lunatic said something like that …"

"Your pathetic ignorance blinds you," Muller said. "We already have the last vital element from Turkey here in the Strahov."

"And that is …?"

"The only true remaining Nephilim. The _Cubiculum Nephili_, the Sleeper. The last of the extinct race, here in the Strahov."

Lara remained sceptical. "Surely the Nephilim are just a myth."

"You see! Ignorance!" Muller said. "With vital essences extracted from this precious specimen, Meister Eckhardt can breed the next generation of pure Nephilim. No more abomination to run amok, like Boaz' Proto-Nephilim. She deserved to pay for her stupidity."

"Yes," Lara sarcastically concurred, "highly inconvenient having abominations running around, isn't it?"

"You have no idea what you are mocking!" Muller said and pulled out a bottle of insecticide. Before Lara could react, the poisonous green puffs had invaded her nostrils and windpipe. Her eyes smarted, and warm tears streamed down her cheeks. She coughed and staggered backwards.

By the time she had recovered from the insecticide, Muller was nowhere to be seen. The butterflies fluttered peacefully around the exotic plants.

* * *

Karel and Eckhardt were still seated in front of the security monitors of the surveillance office, when Muller entered the room, out of breath from running. "What … the hell … is Croft … doing here?" he inquired while catching his breath.

"How should we know?" Karel shrugged. "We were just watching your little encounter in the Biodome."

Muller knew that not many of the building's security cameras contained microphones as well. Thus, Karel and Eckhardt had probably only seen, not heard his conversation with the intruder. "I told her nothing of the Cabal's plans," he lied.

"Good," Eckhardt said, but you could tell from his cold look in his eyes that he was perfectly aware of his minion's treachery. "You told her nothing – even when she held you at gunpoint?"

Muller nodded, sweat trickling down his forehead. "I would never betray the secrets of the great work."

"That was a rather long conversation," Karel said. "What _were_ you really rattling on about, then?"

Muller's voice was brimming with panic. "I swear, I didn't … Who's that!" The corpulent gardener abruptly pointed to one of the security monitors, where a brown-haired man in his mid-thirties was sneaking down a corridor. He was armed with a 9mm pistol and a strange frisbee-like weapon with razorsharp blades.

"Kurtis Trent," Eckhardt said, while Muller sat down on a chair next to Karel. "He's at the airlocks between the Biodome and the Sanitarium."

Karel stared at the security monitors and gave a vaguely intrigued smile. "Miss Croft seems to be approaching that area, too. I wonder what will happen when the two of them meet?"

"I hope they kill each other off," Muller grumbled.

* * *

The airlocks were claustrophobia-inducing, round rooms, dimly lit by fluorescent tubes. The dark grey walls were made of a smooth, vinyl-like material. The doors opened automatically when you approached them, but as Lara walked through the last airlock before the Sanitarium, the doors in front of her wouldn't move one millimetre. "_Splendid._"

Lara spun around to backtrack, but with a soft hiss, the opposite doors slid out to block the other exit. Lara groaned with exasperation and tugged at their edges. The doors refused to budge. She was trapped in the airlock. "_How utterly splendid._" Lara rested her forehead on the large window in the door and glared at the hallway outside.

Suddenly, a figure moved out in front of the window. Lara instinctively pulled out her Scorpion X and trained the pistol on the man outside, although she couldn't possibly shoot through the thick plexiglass. But that didn't matter. The man was neither one of the Agency's guards nor a member of the Cabal. It was the strange guy who had frisked her and snatched the Obscura painting at the Louvre. "You really have made a mess of things, haven't you?" he said.

Lara holstered her gun. "Who for? The stalker who stole my painting! What do you need with the painting?"

"Maybe I'll explain later, Miss Croft, but for now I need to go and turn the power back on."

"Leaving me here."

"You've caused enough problems over the last two days. Safer for everyone if you stay in one place for a while. You'll be okay in there."

Lara reached into her backpack and produced the crystalline shard, which she had found in the alley outside the Louvre when Bouchard woke her up. "And this?" she said, slamming the dagger-like shard up against the pane.

The man's eyes widened with shock and frustration. "My Periapt shard! You …"

"… picked it up at the Louvre, yes," Lara finished his sentence. "After _you_ stole _my_ painting."

The man shook his head. "All this can wait. I know where you'll be." He started walking down the hallway. "Take a breather from damaging things, why don't ya?" He turned a corner and left the trapped woman's range of vision.

Lara instantly started pacing up and down the airlock, muttering every single swearword in her vocabulary.

* * *

A/N: Thanks for all the great suggestions. I'm definetely going to cover what happens to Kurtis while Lara's in the vault, and Karel also seems like an interesting character to dwell on. 


	17. Sanitarium

Chapter 17: Sanitarium

The sanitarium wards consisted of security offices, labs, gloomy corridors and cells. The walls were green and sterile, with hundreds of silvery doors opening into the rooms of the 'patients'. Some of the doors had been ripped off their hinges, while others were locked and bolted shut, with miserable screeches coming from the other side. Even the smoky, stale air conveyed an atmosphere void of hope.

Kurtis Trent stealthily made his way through the corridor. A mangled Agency soldier lay on the other side of the doorway at the end, oozing blood over the black-and-white chequered floor. But he was still alive. He stared at Kurtis through his gasmask, mumbling two last words: "Help … me …"

A grey, inhuman arm shot out from behind the doorway and drove its long claws into the soldier's abdomen. The commando yelped in agony and struggled to crawl away, but something – a creature behind the doorway, just outside of Kurtis' range of vision – dragged him away, across the corridor. Kurtis ran up to the doorway with his Boran X at the ready, but the soldier was nowhere to be seen. A trail of blood led across the floor and up the wall, disappearing into the narrow opening of a vent duct.

Kurtis lowered his pistol and glared at the blood-smeared vent opening. "And I thought this would be one of my easy days …"

As if on cue, a cell door burst open, and a patient ran clumsily down the hallway towards Kurtis. The patient wore a tight, grey uniform, which left everything to the imagination. A white muzzle covered his or her face. Long, grey strips of a rubber-like material hung from its bony hands and dragged on the floor. Its travesty of a voice only uttered a furious snarl, as it leapt at Kurtis and lashed out at him.

Kurtis instinctively aimed his Boran X and fired twice at the patient's head. It collapsed on the grimy floor. It might once have been an ordinary human being, but through her experiments, Boaz had transformed it into this killing machine. Kurtis shuddered and wandered on down the hallway.

More mutilated Agency guards lay on the floor, while most of their entrails were splattered over the walls and ceiling. "_This looks bad. Real bad._" Kurtis wondered if the escaped patients were the culprits. "_No, that's impossible. Something far more powerful did this. Probably the same creature that dragged that soldier into the duct._"

He noticed an open cell door to his right and peeked into the room. A patient sat on the filthy cot, which also happened to be the only furniture inside. The man wore the restrictive uniform as well, but his head was free of the muzzle. All hair had been shaved off, and his face was bruised and enervated. The few teeth he had left were nothing more than rotten, dark yellow fragments. His eyes stared emptily at the floor.

Kurtis walked up to the patient and tried to start a conversation. "What's going on down here?"

"Dying! We're all dying!" the patient whimpered, his voice hoarse and pervaded by a Turkish accent. "Proto's on the loose. Black Angel's gonna kill us!"

"Get a grip. What's gonna kill us?" Kurtis said, deducing that this 'Black Angel' might be the culprit of the bloodbath in the hallway.

"The Proto!" the patient repeated. "It got free. We got fed to it, but it ate the guards when the power shut down."

"What the hell's the Proto?"

"The screamer! The Black Angel!"

Kurtis realized that the patient was too horrified to explain what the 'Proto' actually was. "I don't give a damn about your Black Angel. What are you doing down here?"

"I didn't sign on for this, not devils and shadows." The patient shuddered. "I'm just a truck driver."

"What? You drove here?"

"Four days on the road, from Turkey. Long way, long way …"

"What did you bring here?" Kurtis already knew the answer, but he wanted to have his suspicion confirmed before he could believe the disturbing news. "What – were – you - carrying?"

"Death inside five tons of Turkish stone. The Sleeper."

Kurtis felt the cold fingers of dread gripping his skull. The stakes had just been raised. The Cubiculum Nephili was here, with Eckhardt and the Cabal. And he was the only one around to stop them.

"Drove here," the patient continued, "then they grabbed us. She locked us in here with her hungry pet, the screamer, the Proto!"

"You were fed to that thing?"

"Fed to it, yes. But not me." The patient shook his head vehemently. "No, not me, I'm safe in here …"

"Yeah, sure. Keep the door locked, okay?" Kurtis started walking out to the corridor.

"You can't hide out there," the patient yelled after him. "He'll get you! He'll get us all!"

Kurtis tried to shrug off the half-insane man's words, but they kept haunting his thoughts as he walked down the corridor. He soon reached a wall of iron grating, blocking his path. The door in the middle of the grating was locked, and he had to press a five-digit code in the keypad to proceed. "_My farsee ability will help here._" Kurtis raised his arms and held his palms out between the bars. Clenching his eyes shut, he let his mind and senses stream through his fingertips to the corridor on the other side.

_Out._

_Dark green walls. Smoke and dust in the air. Another one of Boaz' patients on the loose. Screams. Muffled weeping. More cells. A guard's corpse. Arm ripped off. Snarling voices._

_Ignore them. Find the door code._

_An office to my left. See through the window. Papers on the control panel._

_Through the door._

_A post-it on the table. Numbers scribbled across it._

_Remember them._

_**06289 06289 06289**_

_Good. Back. Up the hallway. Through the grating. _

Kurtis felt his sight return to his body like a flash of lightning into his skull. He groaned and reeled backwards, a migraine throbbing behind his forehead. But as usual, the headache wore off as quickly as it had come. He stood motionless for a few seconds, catching his breath as if he'd just broken through the water surface after a long dive. Farsee trips always exhausted him.

He pressed '06289' on the keypad and stepped through the door.

* * *

Lara sat on the cold floor, leaned against the vinyl-like wall of the airlock. She held the Periapt shard up and ran her eyes over its crystalline surface. It was just as mysterious as its owner. What was that man doing in the Strahov? Was he on Eckhardt's side?

"_No. If he did work for the Cabal, he'd have killed me without a second's thought. Besides, he wasn't wearing the Agency's uniform, and his weapons were different._"

'**Periapt Telum**' was written on the shard's blunt-looking blade. Lara recalled that Telum was the Latin word for 'spear', 'weapon' or even 'beam of light'. "_The Periapt shards … Didn't Werner mention something like that in his notes?_" Lara pulled out the notebook and soon found the information she wanted: '**Lux Veritatis – 'Light of Truth'. A 12th century order of monks who hid the Obscura paintings. Said to posses the three Periapt artifacts - crystalline shards shaped like spearheads.**'

"_So that guy's a Lux Veritatis warrior. Well, then at least he can't be on Eckhardt's side._"

* * *

Several storeys beneath the airlocks, Kurtis was sprinting through a hallway in a maximum containment area below the Sanitarium. His footsteps reverberated through the corridor, but other, faster footsteps followed behind him. They were the footsteps of a lithe animal, the footsteps of a carnivorous creature chasing its prey whilst growing ever more hungry.

Kurtis reached the end of the hallway and rushed down a metal stairway. He burst through a wide doorway to his right and into the huge hall with the main power lever. But before he could turn the Strahov's grid back on, he would have to get rid of the Proto-Nephilim stalking him.

Kurtis reached out his right fist and clutched the thin air, moving his arm as if pulling something down. The gate in front of him simultaneously descended from the ceiling. In the room outside, the Proto leapt down the stairway and landed a few metres from the doorway, but the gate slammed to the floor before the creature could reach its prey.

While the Proto roared with exasperation, Kurtis let out a sigh of relief. That relief was short-lived, however. A cacophony of clanking footsteps came from above, and Kurtis glared up at the source of the noise.

Ventilation ducts.

"Oh fuck." Kurtis followed the hidden creature with wide, unblinking eyes. It crawled up the shafts with the ease and agility of a spider, following the maze of ducts behind the walls, until the noises stopped at a vent opening just below the ceiling. For a brief moment, complete silence reigned the hall.

The Proto shattered that silence with a wrathful roar as it leapt out from the opening, diving through the smoky air, landing on the floor before Kurtis.

The creature's body resembled a cross between a wild boar and a wolf, lacking fur, but rippling its grotesque muscles. Its skin was dark grey, but some parts had peeled off to reveal the crimson flesh underneath. Two serpent-like fangs protruded from its jaws, and its narrow eyes glowed a bright shade of yellow. Numerous white horns, reminiscent of an elephant or a rhinoceros, jutted up from its back. It was clearly half Nephilim. Kurtis would have to defeat it with a single Periapt shard – Lara had taken his other one.

Kurtis instantly aimed his Boran X and kept squeezing the trigger as rapidly as possible. Bullets plunged into the Proto's hideous flesh, but the animal just scrambled towards Kurtis, completely unabated. The man jumped backwards and sailed through the air while emptying the Boran's clip into the monster. He soon bumped into the stone wall and fell to the floor, cornered. The Proto jumped at him, raising its claws to slash his throat, screaming in triumph …

… but Kurtis raised his leg, thrusting his booted foot out, delivering a powerful kick to the Proto's chest. The creature's scream of triumph turned into a roar of pain. It flew back across the hall, ramming into a few pipes at the far wall. The metal surfaces cracked, and white steam came hissing out.

Kurtis scrambled to his feet and slapped a new clip into the Boran X. The Proto was already sprinting towards him again, but he took good aim this time and fired a single bullet into the creature's right eye. The yellow slit burst, blood squirting from the remaining wound. The Proto screeched and collapsed.

Kurtis pulled out his Periapt shard, raised it over his head and drove it into the creature's torso in one swift movement. The blade cut through the tainted flesh like a hot knife through butter. Bizarre entrails splattered onto the floor. Blood sprayed up, drenching the white and dark blue sleeves of Kurtis' shirts. The Proto let out one last scream, then rested silently in the hot pool of blood flowing from its stomach.

Kurtis slowly stepped back from the Proto-Nephilim's corpse and tucked the shard back into a small pocket in his shoulder holster. For a few seconds, he let his eyes close and stood motionless, enjoying the silence.

Then, he walked across the hall and pulled the lever for the main power.

* * *

In the surveillance office, Karel, Eckhardt and Muller had watched the fight between Kurtis Trent and the Proto-Nephilim on the security monitors. "Well, it seems the male intruder isn't completely useless," Muller commented. "It only took him a few minutes to get rid of this problem, which Boaz did not dare to confront for many years."

"And he even turned the power back on," Karel added. "How helpful."

Eckhardt remained silent. He stared at the Periapt shard in Trent's holster and the other one in Croft's hand.

Karel was contemplating Miss Croft. The farther she had ventured into the Strahov, the more fascinated he had felt by her courage and determination. So far, she had displayed remarkable strength – both physically and mentally. Karel had never seen such strength in any other woman, not even Dr. Kristina Boaz. If one could somehow make Croft realize how pointless her quest to stop the Cabal really was, she could become a brilliant ally.

In his calm mind, Karel was already choosing which words he would use to convince her.

* * *

The moment Lara heard the footsteps coming down the hallway outside, she scrambled to her feet and started climbing the wall. After a few quick, acrobatic moves, she had perched herself under the ceiling, gazing at the floor three metres below.

The doors hissed aside, and the familiar brown-haired man entered the airlock, pistol at the ready. Lara dropped down behind him. He instantly spun around, but Lara kicked the Boran X out of his hand and trained her own Rigg 09 on his forehead.

Kurtis closed his eyes, realizing that his life would inevitably end now.

Lara pulled the trigger.

The bullet pierced the frontal lobe and plunged into the brain, effortlessly snuffing out the victim's life. He let out an agonized groan and fell to the cold floor.

Kurtis opened his eyes. He had felt the bullet whistle past his head. Lara still stood in front of him, aiming her pistol at something to his left. Confused, Kurtis turned around in time to see one of Boaz' mutant 'patients' landing on the steel floor. Blood trickled out from the hole in his muzzle. If Lara hadn't shot him, he would have assaulted Kurtis with the animal claws protruding from his human hands.

Kurtis looked back at the woman, astonished. He had expected to die there and then, but instead, Lara had saved his life.

"Thanks."

* * *

A/N: Stay tuned for the story of how Kurtis got knocked out before the fight against Boaz … 


	18. Alliance and treachery

Chapter 18: Alliance and treachery

"Glad you came back to save me, stranger," Lara said, still training her pistol on the man's head.

"Name's Kurtis." He reached out a hand to shake hers, but Lara instantly grabbed his wrist and thrust him up against the wall.

"Lara," she introduced herself and started searching him. "And this is business."

"I owe you one," Kurtis said.

"You owe me a painting," Lara corrected him.

"Sorry. That went AWOL at the Louvre."

"What brings you here from Paris?" Lara noticed the strange, frisbee-like weapon hanging from Kurtis' waistband at his right hip. '**Chirugai Lamina**' was inscribed on the bronze disk. Lara recalled that 'Lamina' was the Latin word for 'blade'. She pulled off the Chirugai blade and tossed it away.

"Eckhardt," Kurtis said. "We have business that only one of us will walk away from. You?"

Lara grabbed the man's shoulder and turned him around to face her. "Personal reasons."

"Eckhardt plans to use all five Obscura paintings to revive an ancient evil called the Sleeper and rebreed the Nephilim race," Kurtis explained. "To do that, he collects alchemically transmuted elements from his murder victims' bodies."

"I've seen him at work as the Monstrum, with that glove." Lara shuddered at the memory of Luddick's demise.

"Eckhardt is the original Black Alchemist, and now he's very close to finding the last painting."

The Chirugai disk started to glow yellow and rose from the floor. It flew through the airlock, encircling Lara and Kurtis as if protecting them.

"Does he know where it is?"

Kurtis nodded gravely. "Yes. It's hidden in a Lux Veritatis vault beneath the Strahov. That painting must be destroyed, and to do that, I need the shard you picked up at the Louvre."

Lara felt a strange heat rushing past the back of her neck, as the Chirugai flew around her and Kurtis in hypnotic circles. She glanced down at the shard in her left hand. "There should be three Periapt shards."

Kurtis pulled out his own shard. "Eckhardt has the last one. If all three shards are united, they can destroy him permanently, so he keeps it safe."

"Tell me about the shards."

"They're ancient weapons of the Lux Veritatis. Two of them were entrusted to my father." Kurtis' eyes narrowed with hatred. "Eckhardt murdered him to stop them passing into my hands. He failed." The Chirugai swept around him even faster, constantly slicing through the air, longing to attack real flesh.

"So Eckhardt went after your father, and you want revenge?" Lara deduced.

"Justice!" Kurtis reached up and caught the Chirugai. The disk instantly stopped to rest on his fingers, its fiery glow fading once more.

"We should work together," Lara said, holstering her pistol.

"You're trusting me?"

"Here," Lara tossed him the Periapt shard. "How can they be used to kill Eckhardt?"

"He must be stabbed with all three shards."

"We can divide the forces against us if we split up," Lara stated. "You need the third Periapt shard, so you should go after that. I'll find the last painting and destroy it."

Kurtis nodded. "Eckhardt guards the shard in his old alchemy lab in the lower regions. I can find my way there."

Lara produced the engraving from Vasiley's place. "The engraving shows the painting hidden in something called the Vault of Trophies." She pointed to the Vault on the map. "Here. The entrance is underwater – no problem."

Lara pocketed the engraving and walked out of the airlock, down the corridor. Kurtis left through the opposite exit.

* * *

Muller had left the surveillance room ten minutes ago to find a radio and inform Gunderson of the Proto-Nephilim's death. Meanwhile, Eckhardt and Karel had been watching the two intruders' conversation on the security monitors. Karel was surprised at how easily Croft had allied herself with Kurtis and designed their strategy to stop the Cabal. "How did she get the engraving and the map?" 

"It doesn't matter," the alchemist said. "We have lost too many men trying to open that damned Vault. Perhaps her special talents will help us get what we need." He glanced up at Trent on the monitor screens. "The male will be coming this way soon. Make the preparations."

"There's no danger she can destroy the last painting?" Karel asked.

"We won't allow her the opportunity. The fifth Obscura painting is mine already. And then …" A smile of anticipation broadened on Eckhardt's pale face.

* * *

Lara swam through the maze of tunnels under the aquatic research center. Fortunately, she had found some excellent scuba gear there, including an aqua-lung filled with oxygen. The light blue wetsuit clung to her body and thighs, as she fought currents and dove down the hallways. Shoals of little fish twirled and billowed around her like a silvery mist. The walls were filled with Latin inscriptions and medieval reliefs. 

Lara dove on into the lower corridors of the labyrinth. Black iron spikes began to shoot out of the walls. Lara narrowly dodged them and continued to the end of the maze. The last tunnel looked like a dead end, but as Lara kicked the wall, the bricks collapsed and revealed a round opening to the Vault itself.

The huge dome ceiling and circular wall were built with the same grand precision of the tomb beneath the Louvre. Eight statues of Lux Veritatis warriors lined the wall. They wore knights' armour and held long, rusty swords out, as if ready to attack. Their names were inscribed on the bases of their statues – most of them were apparently from western Europe, just like the members of the Cabal. Lara swam along the wall and read the monks' names: '**Montsegur**', '**Guilhelm**', '**Lineoux**', '**Bogomil**', '**DeCombel**', '**Aicard**', '**Occitan**' and '**Vasiley**'.

"_Vasiley! So Mathias Vasiley was a Lux Veritatis monk, or at least related to one," _Lara figured_. "That would explain why Eckhardt killed him off._"

A large plaque at the wall was carved with an image of two knights crossing swords in a gesture of alliance. The caption read '**Fratribus Collates Ianuae Patent**.' Lara translated it to: 'Brothers reunited see the gates thrown open.'

Two letters were carved next to the knights – a L and a V. "_An abbreviation for Lux Veritatis? Or maybe … Linoux and Vasiley?_"

There was a narrow alcove behind each knight, and a long, vertical chain was stretched out inside each of the niches. Lara swam into Linoux' alcove and pulled the chain. The statue immediately moved to the middle of the room, transported by some hidden machinery under the floor. Lara swam across the hall and tugged at the chain behind Vasiley, whose statue was also pulled to the center.

The statues of Lineoux and Vasiley stood motionless, crossing swords like their relief twins on the plaque. Then, a bright blue glow radiated from the weapons' blades and rose through the water. It grew and shimmered like an oversize, luminous jellyfish. The weird light soon reached the top of the vault and spread its tendrils over the dome. With a muffled boom, the stone surface exploded and collapsed. Rubble sank through the water.

Lara swam up to the new opening, broke through the water surface and pulled up into a large, warm cavern. The tunnel before her led downwards to more hellish traps and hidden artifacts. She changed to her dry clothes, tore the aqua-lung off her face and blissfully inhaled the stale, dusty air of the underground tomb. "_Just like old times._"

* * *

Steel walls reflected Kurtis' stealthy movements as he crept down the hallway. He had reached an area north of the Sanitarium, beneath the bio-research facilities. Eckhardt's lab had to be somewhere nearby. 

The doors at the end of the corridor were shut tight, and Kurtis didn't know the code for the number keypad. He lowered his pistol and closed his eyes, concentrating his telekinetic energy on the locked exit. But the doors refused to budge a single centimetre.

A scornful voice seeped in from the other side: "Open sesame."

The doors instantly burst open, smacking into Kurtis' bowed head. The man flew backwards and landed on the unforgiving floor. Pain exploded inside his skull. The Boran X fell from his hand and clattered across the hallway.

"Kurtis Trent, old boy! Words cannot describe how glad I am to see you again," said a familiar voice. A tall, strongly built figure marched up to Kurtis and shot him a glare that was anything but friendly.

The Chirugai flew up, blades spinning around furiously, but its target's reflexes were too quick and his grip too strong. Before the disk could decapitate him, Gunderson caught it in his right hand, cutting his palm on the blades. Blood dripped from the black glove. Kurtis grinned.

Gunderson's booted foot connected with the man's stomach. Kurtis' triumphant smile vanished, and he doubled up on the cold floor, gasping for air. Gunderson glowered at the Chirugai, which seemed eager to fly off his fingers.

Kurtis tried to kick his assailant, but Gunderson grabbed the man's foot and flung him around, through the doorway. The warrior tumbled onto a platform in the middle of an immense hall. The ceiling was curved up in an awe-inspiring dome, and the bottom was covered in sand, like the arena of a colosseum. Muller and Eckhardt stood on the platform.

At the sight of the latter, Kurtis scrambled to his feet and used his telekinetic powers to pull the pistol closer, up to his outstretched hand. He trained it on Eckhardt and was one splitsecond from pulling the trigger, when Eckhardt merely reached out his right hand and let a wave of electric energy stream from his gloved fingers. Kurtis staggered back and collapsed on the edge of the walkway, coughing blood up. The pistol flew off the edge and landed on the arena below.

Eckhardt approached the fallen warrior, grabbed him by the throat, dragged him up and let him dangle above the arena. "In revenge for 500 years of pain, I swore an oath of malice against my Lux Veritatis jailors," the alchemist informed. "Over the decades, I hunted them down. None escaped. And all tasted the agony I had endured in the Pit. Now, the son of Konstantin has come to avenge his father. The reckless child actually thinks he can kill _me, _Pieter Van Eckhardt, the Great Alchemist who made a pact with the Nephilim 600 years ago. They gave me the greatest of all gifts - immortality. And you thought you could actually kill me!"

Kurtis couldn't even retort. He managed to rip the Chirugai out of Gunderson's grip, but Eckhardt easily caught the weapon, not even wincing when it came rushing towards his head. The alchemist kept his grip on Kurtis' neck tight enough to cause pain, yet loose enough to let him breathe.

"Well, I am afraid I will have to disappoint you," Eckhardt said. "You will never have your revenge, and you will not even survive this foolish attempt to exact it. Your journey ends in here."

Black spots danced across Kurtis' field of vision, and he realized that he was losing consciousness. He kicked and lashed out, but Eckhardt relentlessly squeezed his throat.

"_Ex hostium vi mea vis maior_, Trent. Do not struggle. After all, I would never kill you." Eckhardt smiled. "Unlike your far more _worthy_ father, you do not deserve to die at the hand of a great alchemist such as myself. A more fitting demise awaits you. And I can still use you for a little trade, when Croft returns from the Vault."

In the last seconds before he drifted into complete darkness, Kurtis heard Eckhardt close his soliloquy with five horribly plausible words: "Besides, you are already dead."

* * *

Gunderson felt satisfied. Satisfied by what he had done to Trent, satisfied by the more effective torment Eckhardt had administered, and satisfied by the complete failure the intruder's mission had ended in. Trent deserved it all. He had once worked for the Agency, and now he was fighting against them. Gunderson despised that. The deceit. The treachery. In Gunderson's opinion, the worst thing a man could do was to betray his master. Pick a side, any side, as long as you remember to _stay_ on that side. 

"Shall we let Boaz dispose of him and Croft, Master Eckhardt?" he asked.

"Yes." Eckhardt attached the Chirugai back at Kurtis' right waistband. "And he can have his blade back; I don't care for pathetic Lux Veritatis tricks."

* * *

Lara had reached the library at the end of the underground complex. The hall was approximately 25 metres long and five metres wide, bookcases filled with ancient tomes lining the stone walls. Lit chandeliers, torches and a fireplace illuminated the Gothic architecture. Tapestries, knights' armour, axes and other weapons hung on the walls. Lara walked up to a worktable with cups, candles and dusty manuscripts scattered across it. A sceleton wearing a crimson robe was seated in a throne-like chair at the table. Through empty eyesockets, he stared lifelessly at the open book before him. Lara studied the monk's writing. 

'**HISTORY OF THE SUPPRESSION OF THE BLACK ALCHEMIST BY THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE LUX VERITATIS - YEAR OF SALVATION 1461. **

**Eckhardt was to use his devilish arts to awaken the Sleeper. For this, he created the Sanglyph, forged of five metallic symbols. Eckhardt was brought low when he tried to betray his unholy Nephilim masters. Good Lux Veritatis brothers now guard the accursed alchemist in the Pit. Only the three Periapt Shards restrain him**.'

Lara heard a strange grunt behind her and spun around, raising her Rigg 09. Her jaw dropped and her eyes widened at the sight of two Lux Veritatis warriors. They should obviously have died centuries ago, but their powers and the instinct to guard the Obscura painting had somehow lived on. Their bodies were nothing more than fragile sceletons in armour, but they were strong enough to wield swords and shields.

The undead knights raised their swords, and Lara jumped backwards to dodge the blunt, heavy weapons. She landed on the worktable as the blades slammed onto the floor. Furious at having missed the tomb raider, the knights snarled and ran towards the table. Lara aimed her pistol and fired twice before jumping sideways. A bullet pierced one of the knights' arms at the elbow, and the forearm bones fell to the ground, still clutching the sword handle. The other knight swung his sword at the table, cleaving the wooden surface Lara had just been standing on.

Lara sprinted to the wall and climbed the bookshelves. The injured knight picked up his arm and flung it at her. The sword whizzed through the dusty air and plunged into one of the book spines, a few inches from Lara's head. The disembodied forearm still hung from the handle.

Lara pulled up to the top of the bookcase and climbed the rough wall. The knights below snarled and threw weapons at her, but they seemed to give up once Lara had reached the shadowy ceiling. The tomb raider pulled up to a wooden ledge and turned around. Beams made of metal grating led to the center of the hall. Lara traversed out and down the middle beam. At the end of the narrow path, she jumped onto a chandelier. The chain suspending it fell slightly, lowering the chandelier and triggering a mechanism below.

The flames in the fireplace were immediately quenched, and one of the bookcases slid aside, revealing a compartment behind it. A small, rectangular object rested inside. "_The last Obscura painting!_" Lara lowered herself from the chandelier and dropped to the floor. Before the knights could stop her, she rushed to the compartment and snatched the painting.

Lara noticed a corridor behind the now empty fireplace. She crawled through the opening and stood on the other side. The knights roared in the library behind her.

Lara walked down the secret hallway and examined the painting. Just like the fourth painting beneath the Louvre, it was painted on a thick wooden base with faded colours and a religious motif. This one seemed to depict the angel telling the shepherds of Jesus' birth.

Lara tucked the painting into her backpack before dropping through a pool opening at the end of the hallway. The water felt colder than ice after the warmth of the library. Lara swam through the flooded tunnels. At the bottom of the labyrinth, she found an opening to a round basin with smooth, brown walls – definitely part of the Strahov facilities. And whether Lara wanted to or not, she had to surface here before her lungs ran out of oxygen.

The moment her head broke the middle of the basin surface, a hoarse voice echoed from the platform above: "Congratulations, Miss Croft." Eckhardt slowly clapped his hands with a complete lack of enthusiasm. Muller and Gunderson stood on either side of him.

The waters of the huge basin sunk around the woman, while a round, grey floor rose under her. She had soon ascended from the water, as the new floor reached the same level as the rest of the hall. Red marble pillars and lit torches lined the steel walls. Lara saw Kurtis standing on the edge of the platform. Or rather, he was sitting limply on his knees. The only thing that kept him from slumping to the floor was Eckhardt's hand clutching his neck.

"You are positively Amazonian," Eckhardt told the woman in the arena below. "That Vault has defeated us for months."

"What do you want, Eckhardt?"

"I'm not interested in you or your friend, Miss Croft. Give me the painting, and you may both leave."

"What choice do I have?" Lara flung the painting up to Eckhardt. The alchemist caught it in his gloved hand and dropped his hostage. Kurtis landed on the platform. Gunderson rolled him off the edge with his booted foot. The unconscious man fell to the bottom of the hall. Lara reached out a hand to pull him up, but Kurtis refused to let her help and shakily stood on his own. He picked up his Boran X from the sandy floor.

Eckhardt's voice reverberated from the platform above: "Gunderson, release Boaz."

Gunderson walked up to a control panel and pulled a lever. A huge, thick gate in the wall of the arena rose, revealing a shadowy opening. Lara thought she could make out a monstrous shape in the darkness – about the size of a full-grown elephant, but thinner, insect-like. A chalkwhite face glared out with yellowish eyes. "This old colleague of mine was once a human, before she displeased me," Eckhardt explained.

Lara frowned and tightened her grip on her pistol. "_That bastard said we could leave!_"

Eckhardt and Gunderson started to walk away. Muller followed, but Eckhardt spun around and yelled: "Not you, Muller, you useless piece of dross! You failed me, too!" He pushed the corpulent man back.

A plethora of feelings filled Muller's mind. Shock. Anger. Regret. And finally, the moment he fell off the platform, pure dread.

Lara and Kurtis watched as Muller landed before them in the arena. He scrambled to his feet and saw the weapons in the two intruders' hands. Assuming that they might shoot him, Muller ran away from the duo and towards the dark opening. This, however, turned out to be a grave mistake on Muller's part.

Boaz came out.

* * *

A/N: (cue the cool battle theme) And we all know whose oh-so-tragic deaths are coming up in the next chapter … 


	19. Caducus

Chapter 19: Caducus

The pod had apparently grown and evolved since Lara had last seen it in the Biodome. It resembled an insect, the size of a full-grown Tyrannosaur. Its body pulsated with venom, and thick, dark green plates of skin covered its sides like armour. A cornucopia of horns and claws protruded from its back. Its long, mace-like tail swayed around idly. Boaz' tainted face and hands jutted out from the stomach, her corpse embedded in the creature like a mosquito in resin. The monster's tremendous weight was supported by eight hairy, spider-like legs.

Muller screeched in horror and spun around, but before he could run away from his gruesome fate, the monstrosity burst onto the arena and grabbed the man in its octopus-like mouth. It effortlessly lifted him from the floor and pierced his corpulent stomach with its beetle jaws. Muller's scream was cut short as blood sprayed across the arena and left a crimson streak on the sand.

But Boaz was not satisfied yet. It tossed Muller's limp body away and started rushing towards the remaining prey in the arena, spider legs clicking rapidly against the floor.

Kurtis turned to Lara, holding his intertwined hands out. "Come on, I'll give you a boost."

Lara stepped onto his hands and instantly felt a rush of telekinetic energy pushing her upwards. It was like jumping on a springboard. She flew from the arena, whizzed through the air and landed on the platform under the dome ceiling. Eckhardt and Gunderson had just left through a gate at the end of the walkway. Lara turned around and looked at the Lux Veritatis warrior in the arena below. "Kurtis, quick!"

"Here, take these two!" Kurtis threw his Periapt shards up to her.

Lara caught the chrystalline weapons. "These are _your _speciality, Kurtis."

Kurtis glanced at the approaching Boaz mutant. "Don't worry about ugly here. You're wasting time!"

Lara tightened her grip on the Periapt shards, gave Kurtis one last anxious glance and sprinted out through the gate, after Eckhardt.

"I can take care of _her_," Kurtis said, pulling out his Boran X and turning to face Boaz.

The oversize insect lunged at him, but he jumped back while firing twice at Boaz' real head underneath the grotesque mouth. The monstrosity roared and stopped in the middle of the arena, starting to rock back and forth. Four venom sacks on its back burst open and began to squirt blobs of hot, bright green slime.

Kurtis jumped sideways and barely dodged the bizarre mucilage. The moment he landed at a safe distance from the venom-spewing monstrosity, he took aim and shot two of the sacks. The Boaz mutant raised its forelegs and reared like a panicky horse, roaring in wrath. Its legs pounded back down on the arena, making the sandy floor tremble.

It rushed towards Kurtis with renewed vigour, but he once more shot at Boaz' deathly pale face and leapt back as the creature lunged forward. Boaz roared and opened its squid-like mouth wide, vomiting a thick, green torrent at Kurtis. The spray of toxic slime knocked into Kurtis' chest with the force of water from a firehose. The man flew back a few metres, landing on the goo-splattered floor.

"Bitch!" Kurtis could already feel the acid burning at his clothes. He scrambled to his feet and brushed the large blobs off his t-shirt. Hot smoke rose from the fabric, but his skin was safe.

Boaz pounded towards him once more. Kurtis rushed sideways, as the two remaining sacks on the creature's back opened and spewed their goo. The man took quick aim and fired five bullets at the mutant's side. The first three missed their targets, but the last two bullets pierced the sacks.

Boaz uttered one last furious roar and reared again before collapsing on the sandy ground. Its legs lashed out at the empty air, as the monstrosity rolled across the arena. Kurtis sprinted out of the way, half a second before he would have been crushed under the oversize beetle's back. He watched as it finally rolled to a halt and lay still at the arena wall. The spider legs jutted up motionless in the air. The bright green, pathetic excuse for blood oozed from the wounded sacks.

Kurtis' hands smarted, his clothes were drenched in slime, his head throbbed and bruises covered his back. "That … wasn't … so … hard," he sarcastically mused, gasping for breath, and turned to walk away.

He froze as a sticky, tearing noise came from the carcass behind him.

"_You must be shitting me …_"

Kurtis whirled around in time to see the remains of Boaz' original body emerge from the stomach of the oversize insect. Grey skin clung to her sceleton, slowly peeling off the bones like old paint on an even older surface. Her lab jacket had been reduced to filthy shreds, and her face was more like that of a fly than that of a human being. Her eyes were large, oval pools of pitchblack malice, and her mouth was a narrow crack under a travesty of a nose. The wings of an oversize dragonfly fluttered out from her back. Two smooth, three-feet-long claws hung from her deformed hands. She screeched and whizzed up into the air.

"Oh, gimme a break!" Kurtis raised his pistol once more. "Goddamn bug face …"

The grotesque dragonfly swooped down and lashed her long claws out at him, while hissing with a voice devoid of all sanity: "_Die in pain! Poison and paaaiiin!_"

Kurtis leapt back, frantically pulling the trigger. Boran X ammo and razorsharp claws slashed through the air with equal vigour.

One of the bullets finally plunged into Boaz' left shoulder. The dislocation rendered her arm useless. Boaz screamed and swung her right claw at the warrior, but before the ivory-like blade could connect with the man's throat, Kurtis pulled the trigger again and sent a bullet flying through Boaz' stomach. Tainted bowels splattered down to the ground, followed by the creature's limp body.

Her last scream echoed through the hall and trailed off.

Silence.

Kurtis kept his pistol trained on Boaz' head for a few seconds. Observing no signs of life, he holstered the gun and walked away. Behind him, his enemy lay motionless, defeated …

… _playing dead._

It all happened in a few seconds. Kurtis heard the creature screech with triumphant malice as it leapt to its feet. He felt a white-hot pain erupt in his stomach. He saw blood splatter across the floor in front of him. Red, human blood. His own blood. He looked down and saw Boaz' claw protruding from his abdomen. He heard an agonized groan escape from his mouth, along with the warm drops of blood trickling from the corner of his lips.

"_Sssssuffer, yesss, ssssuffeeeer_ …"

"_Lamina!_"

The Chirugai blade whizzed up and through Boaz' frail neck, decapitating her. The insect-like head flew through the air and rolled across the sandy ground. Boaz' headless body fell back, her claw roughly sliding out of Kurtis' stomach. With a dry thud, she landed on the ground, finally dead.

Kurtis' Chirugai returned with the precision of a boomerang, and he instinctively caught it in his right hand. He held his left hand to his stomach in a feeble attempt to stop the scarlet stream, which relentlessly poured from the wound. Screams rose through his throat, but nothing more than weak groans and blood emerged from his mouth. He slumped to his knees.

"_What's in the cave, father?_"

"_Your destiny."_

Kurtis collapsed in the middle of the arena and lay on his side, shivering. The Chirugai fell from his limp fingers. The sand felt warm under his icy, pale cheek. His eyelids descended over his already blurred vision, and nothing but darkness remained.

"_Lux Veritatis mecum_."

A/N: Profuse apologies to all you Kurtis fans, but I'm following the game's storyline here. Oh, and the title of this chapter is Latin for "falling" or "fallen".


	20. Showdown

Chapter 20: Showdown

The alchemy laboratory was a Gothic, rectangular room with brown stone walls. A solitary sceleton rested in a rusty cage hanging from the ceiling, seven metres above Lara. The intruder entered the room from a sandy tunnel. She quickly ran her eyes over Eckhardt's impressive collection of occult manuscripts, alchemic experiments and torture devices from the Inquisition – head crushers, knee splitters, tongue tearers and other unpleasantness.

Lara walked up to the wooden tables and glanced at Eckhardt's experiments. Phials of purified hydrogen, oxygen, salt and other elements were placed in odd circuits of calcination, putrefaction, solution, distillation and conjunction. The smoke and stench clogged Lara's nostrils and brought tears to her eyes. Coughing, she grabbed some parchment from the table and stepped back to study Eckhardt's writing. It looked like a journal entry from 'Autumn, 1345'.

**I have 100 summers to prepare for the revivifying of the Nephilim bloodline. And the reward for my labours will be immortality.**

**1425. **

**By the means of human sacrifice, the Sanglyph is complete! I have today cast the Nephilim metals into five symbols of power. The Glove, attuned in like fashion, is almost complete. With it I shall harvest those essences necessary for the Sleeper's awakening. By the Glove and Sanglyph combined shall I bestir the Sleeper to my bidding.**

**My every attempt to extract Nephilim essences has come to nought. I need the true cask of the Sleeper. It must be found!**

**The thrice cursed Shard of the Lux Veritatis maggots I have placed beyond reach. With it hidden, none will stand against me. And wherever they lie, I will have the Obscura paintings. Never again will mortals be armed against me and my sacred quest.**

"Sacred quest? I doubt it, Eckhardt," Lara said and dropped the parchment on the stone floor.

She walked through the laboratory and into a round side room with a pool of water in the middle. The clear surface was approximately two metres in diameter. Lara could see a thin pedestal sticking up from the bottom. A dagger-like shard rested on the top of the pedestal, five metres below the water surface. It looked just like Kurtis' two shards – dark blue blade, white handle.

"This looks _too_ easy," Lara figured. She reached out a tentative finger and touched the surface. It felt cool and clear.

Leaving her backpack on the floor, she slowly lowered herself into the pool. It still felt like normal water, but Lara remained suspicious. She took a deep breath of the stale air and easily dove down to the top of the pedestal. The words '**Periapt Telum**' were inscribed on the shard. This was obviously one of the Lux Veritatis artifacts she would need to defeat Eckhardt. Lara snatched the crystalline shard.

Noises of ancient machinery immediately reverberated from the wall of the pool. Lara catched a glimpse of trapdoors opening, a black substance spilling out.

The tomb raider whirled around and swam back, kicking one foot against the pedestal to propel herself upwards as rapidly as possible. The oily substance rose below her like a menacing shadow. The water turned thicker, warmer. As Lara frantically swam towards the surface, she felt the water start to boil around her legs. She wanted to scream, but opening her mouth would hardly improve the situation. She clenched her eyes shut and fought to rise to the surface, fought to survive …

… and as she was almost ready to lose the fight, her head broke through.

Lara gasped for air before letting out a high-pitched scream of agony. Her arms shot out of the water, slapped onto the floor and pulled her up from the hellish pool. She instantly dropped the Periapt shard on the floor, picked up her backpack, searched through the pockets and produced a bottle of spring water, which she had purchased at a German gas station last night.

Lara's legs were as red as a lobster's claws and felt even worse than they looked. Even though the pain had been caused by water, her skin felt like it was being consumed by fire. She ripped the screw cap off the bottle and poured the cool water over her limbs. For a horrifying moment, her entire body went numb, and Lara thought she was going to pass out. Then the searing pain returned, but it was slowly wearing off.

Lara leaned back against the wall. The pool surface had turned utterly black, bubbles and smoke rising from the thick substance. Lara wondered what it could be. Pitch? Oil? Some kind of acid? Whatever it was, it made a remarkably sadistic trap. But Lara was also a remarkably fast swimmer.

The raider picked up the artifact from the pedestal and examined its blunt-looking, yet razorsharp blade. "_The third Periapt shard. Let's see what Eckhardt has to say about this._" Lara stood, tucked all three shards into the pockets of her khaki shorts and walked back through the main laboratory.

A gate had risen in the wall, revealing a steep slope beyond it. Lara walked through the doorway and slid down the tunnel like a surfer riding a wave. The slope twisted around and led her to a hallway ten metres beneath the lab. Her feet skid to a halt in front of a dark blue gate. She pushed the wooden doors open and entered the final area of the Strahov complex.

The round hall looked at least thirty metres high. Three square pillars supported the dome ceiling, arranged in the points of a triangle around the centre of the hall. Lara gripped her pistol tightly and walked out onto this centre. Three metal walkways hung above, surrounding the arena. Ladders led up each pillar to the next walkway.

On the highest walkway, Eckhardt stood at the edge with five occult symbols from the Obscura paintings laid out on the platform before him. As he fused the symbols with telekinetic energy, a blue beam of light shone from the metallic coalescence. "_The Sanglyph! Finally!_" Eckhardt felt a rush of satisfaction, along with the Sanglyph's power surging into its maker. His head lolled back, mouth dropping open to utter a piercing roar of triumph.

Lara's eyes widened as she saw the Cubiculum Nephili being lowered from the ceiling. The Sleeper hung in a leant-back pose as if screaming at the heavens themselves. Intricate patterns and symbols were cut into its pale skin, especially across the face. Horns jutted out from the shoulders, and grotesque tendrils hung from the back of its head. Its body was that of a thin, male human being, and yet an otherworldly beauty emanated from it – signifying its once angelic ancestors.

Lara, however, knew that this was nothing short of a demon. Eckhardt's work had to be stopped. She aimed for the man on the walkway three storeys above and squeezed the trigger.

_BLAM_

Without even blinking once, Eckhardt held out his Sanglyph disk and deflected the bullet.

"Still alive, Miss Croft. You are resilient," Eckhardt said, his voice reverberating through the immense hall. "But over the decades, I've killed more mortals like you than I can remember."

"And stole their body parts, like a cheap grave robber," Lara snapped.

"As I will now take yours." Eckhardt started marching down the walkway, making his way to the arena. Lara fired at him, but he effortlessly dodged the bullets by slipping behind the metal pillars.

"You degenerate throwback!" Lara yelled. "All those organs you ripped from your victims were for waking this _… thing!_"

"Only my great arts can cause the higher race to flourish again."

The alchemist's voice seemed to echo off every single wall and pillar, making it impossible for Lara to determine which direction to take aim at. She spun around while slapping a new clip into her Scorpion X. "So, I guess it's up to me to stop you then?"

"I hunted down and killed the last of the Lux Veritatis," the ubiquitous voice said. "I am immortal!"

Lara merely pulled out the Periapt shards and held them up for Eckhardt to see.

"The shards!"

"Scary, huh?" Lara gave a wry grin. "For you."

"It is my destiny to breed Hell on earth."

Lara suddenly heard the voice coming from one specific direction. She pivoted and saw Eckhardt standing between two pillars, where he had just jumped down from the lowest walkway. The alchemist glared at her through his crescent-shaped glasses. "You are _nothing_ to me."

Lara raised her pistol to aim at his head. "D'you know, it's going to be a real pleasure to shut you up."

The moment Lara had finished her sentence, a vertical ocean surface of colours billowed forth from the floor. The energy field rose and formed a circular wall around the three pillars, trapping Lara in the centre of the hall. She cursed and fired the Scorpion X. The bullets glanced off from the swirling mist, and Eckhardt stood protected on the other side. Even if the shield hadn't been there, bullets would only weaken the alchemist. Lara had to finish him off with the shards.

"You can't win!" Eckhardt bellowed. "I will harvest your organs!" He swung the Sanglyph out, and flames emerged from its bronze surface. The majestic wave of fire broadened in the blink of an eye and rushed across the entire arena.

Lara waited for the right moment, then jumped up as the wave passed under her. For a splitsecond, she felt the tongues of countless flames licking up towards her feet. Then, the fire vanished behind her and she landed on the floor, unscathed.

Eckhardt roared again and jumped up behind the force field. In mid-air, he vanished in a flash of blue light, teleporting himself. Lara whirled around in time to see him appear and land on the opposite side of the hall.

"Surrender to your fate." Eckhardt held the Sanglyph out again, energy streaming through his gloved fingers. A blue light swept over the arena. Lara dropped to the floor, narrowly dodging the electric shock.

Eckhardt ran to the middle of the energy field between two pillars and abruptly stopped, bowing his head. Lara frowned. The concentrated man reached his arms up, and a reddish glare appeared between all three pillars. As the light faded down, Lara saw three figures standing around the arena, just outside the energy field. The figures were charred and blackened by flames, their heads and arms hanging limply, but they were obviously copies of the alchemist himself. Lara spun around and restlessly aimed her pistol from one Eckhardt duplicate to the next. The original maker was nowhere to be seen.

Suddenly, all three copies sprinted into the arena. Lara briefly thought they were going to attack her, but the unholy trinity merely ran to the center and fused together in a flash of light. The ground shook as the real alchemist appeared in the middle of the hall.

Lara quickly regained her balance and ran towards Eckhardt. He looked weak and exhausted, reeling with closed eyes. Lara didn't hesitate to deliver a hard kick to his head. Eckhardt slumped on his knees. Lara pulled out a Periapt shard and jabbed it down …

"_For Luddick._"

… into the man's chest.

Eckhardt opened his eyes and uttered a long, deafening scream. His agony echoed through the entire hall. Lara savoured the noise.

Eckhardt scrambled to his feet and tried to run away, but Lara flung the second shard after him. "_For Werner._"

The blade plunged into the alchemist's back. Eckhardt screamed again and collapsed against a pillar. He sat hunched up and silent, awaiting his demise. Now that the Periapt shards were restraining him, the energy field vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. Lara produced the third and last shard. She walked up to her fallen enemy and raised the shard above her head.

"_For Kurti-_"

A vice-like hand gripped her wrist and wrenched the Lux Veritatis weapon from her fingers, while the other hand effortlessly pushed her to the floor. Lara landed on her stomach, spun around and trained both pistols on the assailant. The blonde Englishman stood motionless, Periapt shard clutched in his gloved hand, ready to strike.

It took a second for Lara to recognize the last remaining Cabal member. "Karel?"

Eckhardt looked up weakly, two shards already stabbed into his torso. "Go on! Kill her!" he hissed.

In one fluid movement, Karel kneeled before Eckhardt and drove the shard into the alchemist's forehead. Eckhardt never even had time to realize his colleague's treachery. With one last rattle, his head hung limply over his blood-drenched chest. The Black Alchemist had finally been defeated.

* * *

To be concluded ... 


	21. Ecce Veritas

Chapter 21: Ecce Veritas

_All is not as it seems._

-Werner Von Croy

Lara scrambled to her feet, still training her pistols on the back of Karel's head.

"I knew you'd find the third shard," Karel told Lara as he stood and turned around to face her.

Lara frowned. "But why? You worked for him."

"No," Karel said. "Unknowingly, he worked for me. But his usefulness was ended."

"Will you destroy his work?" Lara glanced up at the Cubiculum Nephili hanging under the dome ceiling.

"Of course not," Karel shook his head. "The Great Work will be finished." He extended a hand towards Lara in a gesture of collaboration. Lara noticed a strange, circular symbol that looked like it had once been cut deep into the flesh of his palm. "I'm offering you the chance to become part of a benign new order in the world."

Lara remained suspicious. "You _are_ kidding … right?"

Karel's body suddenly went through a grotesque transformation. His skin turned dark grey with intricate, scar-like patterns covering his face. His hair changed colour from blonde to white, while his eyes turned pitchblack. "We Nephilim have only ever been trying to survive."

'_They were the cursed hybrid offspring of humans and angels - thought to be able to change their physical appearance …_'

Lara's eyes widened with awe, and she took a few careful steps backwards, tightening her grip on both pistols. "Too many people have died for me to trust you. Including a good friend - Von Croy."

"He was an unfortunate victim of history, Lara." Karel's body changed again, into that of Louis Bouchard. "Eckhardt was stupid to have killed him." Another transformation, and Luddick replaced the late Frenchman. "I have helped you all along, both here and in Paris." The journalist's appearance was erased, and a duplicate of Kurtis Trent appeared, staring at Lara with those familiar, blue eyes.

The illusion lasted for a mere splitsecond. Karel's Nephilim visage returned, still extending his marked hand towards the woman. "You can trust me, Lara Croft."

Lara stared at the symbol on his palm. Deep lines forming a circle in the pale skin.

A circle.

_A flash of lightning is reflected in Werner Von Croy's glasses, briefly forming two white circles over his eyes. He leans forward in his armchair and speaks to his former protégé: "I'm tracking five Obscura paintings for a client called Eckhardt. But he's a psychopath!"_

"_Why should I care?"_

"_Because I'm being stalked! I daren't go into the streets." He rises from his chair and points to the window. "People are dying out there!"_

_Blood pooling from Daniel Rennes' corpse. Arnaud, squirming and moaning on his filthy death bed, awaiting a painful demise._

"_Handle it, Werner."_

"_Lara, please …"_

"_Look, go and see this woman - Carvier. She can help."_

**_The body of a professor Margot Carvier was found after a woman was seen leaving the building under suspicious circumstances. _**

"_I'm going."_

"_No, wait!"_

"_Egypt, Werner. You walked away and left me. There was no pity then."_

_Eckhardt walks into the apartment with quick, determined footsteps. Werner's eyes widen with dread. "Get out! Get out of the way!" He raises his pistol to take aim at the Monstrum. Eckhardt's gloved hand connects with Lara's shoulder and flings her away. She smacks against a bookcase, lands on the floors, unconscious._

_Shots._

_The bullets don't even slow Eckhardt down. He knocks the gun out of Werner's hand, grabs his throat and effortlessly lifts him from the ground. _

"_Von Croy? You located the painting for me. Why have you not delivered it?" His voice is angry, disappointed, tired of waiting. He loosens his grip on the professor's throat enough to let him speak._

"_I daren't collect it. It's too dangerous. But _she_ will be able to …"_

_Eckhardt glances at the fallen woman, then glares back up at Von Croy. His grip tightens like a vice._

"_No! Eckhar---" Werner's voice trails off to an agonized groan, his throat snapping like a fragile branch on an old tree. His legs kick spasmodically for a few seconds, before finally hanging limp._

"_Your usefulness is finished." Eckhardt lets go of the broken neck. Von Croy falls to the floor with a quiet thud. The Monstrum bends over the corpse._

_Lara has now regained enough consciousness to hear the brief, wet noise of a torso being ripped open._

_Within a minute, Eckhardt has daubed his symbols across the wall. He walks back to Werner Von Croy's corpse and picks up the old glasses. As he crushes the lenses in his hand, a flash of white light envelopes his body. In the blink of an eye, he has changed back to his true shape. The shape of Joachim Karel._

"_You humans break so easily," Karel states and drops the splintered glasses. They land next to Lara's face, right before her closed eyes._

_As Karel turns to leave the apartment, those closed eyes begin to flutter open. They catch a glimpse of a circle, an odd symbol on ..._

… his extended hand. Lara glared at it, then met the Nephili's awaiting gaze. Tears of anger stung her wide, brown eyes.

"_You_ killed Von Croy."

The tone of her voice and the look on her face was enough to convey the simple answer to Karel's offer: _No._

Karel shook his head, disappointed. He had expected Croft to make the right decision, instead of letting her mind be clouded by these foolish thoughts of revenge. But it was obviously too late to persuade her now. "Stupid mortal. So be it!" A green glare enveloped his body, and he ascended from the ground like an angel without wings.

Lara instantly turned her attention to Eckhardt's corpse. The glove had fallen off his limp hand, the Sanglyph still resting on its fingers. Lara picked up both artifacts and sprinted away, as Karel fired a bright green bolt of energy in her direction. It exploded against the floor in a flash of crackling sparks.

Lara reached a ladder and frantically climbed up to the first walkway. Karel floated in circles through the air, constantly firing waves of energy after Lara. "We Nephilim were once beings of light!" he bellowed after her. "We are destined to rule!"

Lara ignored him and sprinted up the walkway. She soon reached the second ladder. Within seconds, she had climbed to the highest walkway. Sweat trickled down her weary body. Karel noticed the exhaustion and fired another bolt, aiming for her leg. The bolt hit its target, and Lara was swept off the metal floor, falling backwards.

Karel instantly rushed down behind her and wrapped his right arm around her neck. Lara tried to hit him with her elbow, but he caught her arm in his left hand whilst tightening his grip around her throat. Before she could struggle any further, he had flown to the top of the dome ceiling. Lara felt a searing heat as the Nephili's green light began to envelop her body.

"The time has come for the Nephilim to live in freedom once more. It's still not too late to join us, Croft," he spoke into her ear.

Lara gingerly slid her right hand into Eckhardt's glove. The Sanglyph felt warm and stingy around her fingers, charged with electric energy.

"You cannot imagine the powers I would grant you. Endless wisdom and strength. Even immortality …" He turned her around and held her by the throat. His pitchblack gaze bored into her brown eyes. "Make the right choice, and we will complete the Great Work together."

"_This_ is the right choice." Lara thrust her gloved hand out and pressed the Sanglyph against Karel's chest.

The Nephili roared in pain and fell down through the entire hall. Lara fell with him, but as they whizzed past the Cubiculum Nephili, she managed to reach out and grab its ankle. The yellowish skin felt cold and slimy.

As Karel recovered from the Sanglyph's painful shock, he used his Nephilim abilities to repress gravity, slowing down to land safely on the floor. He looked up at the mortal dangling from the Sleeper's leg.

Lara attached the Sanglyph to the creature's ankle and let go. The artifact was already shimmering with a blinding, white glare. In mid-air, Lara grabbed a wire and swung in a majestic arch to land on the bottom of the hall.

A white glow started to emanate from the Sleeper. Beams of light shot out from its body, one of them impaling Karel. The Nephili stood motionless and screamed in agony as the light plunged through his chest. The glare spread from the Sleeper and exploded in an immense, white sphere, defeating all shadows.

Lara heard the explosion behind her as she sprinted towards the exit. Rubble fell from the ceiling, barely missing the running woman. Lara reached her hands out, pushed the doors open, burst out to the narrow stone hallway beneath the laboratory. The light billowed after her and filled her vision. For a moment, it seemed as if the whole world was bathed in this beautiful, warm light …

"_You did it, Lara. It's over._"

Silence. Hesitation.

"_I know. Good to see you again, Werner._"

"_I couldn't leave you._"

* * *

Lara's eyes fluttered open. She lay on the cold, dusty cavern floor under the Strahov. "_How long was I unconscious?_"

She turned her head slightly to contemplate the entrance to the Sleeper's hall. The doors had been blown off their hinges and lay useless on the ground. The doorway was blocked by an enormous heap of rocks, metal stumps and other rubble. The hall had collapsed, and no one would ever enter it again.

Lara shakily stood and began wandering up the tunnel. Having attained a slight limp and a throbbing headache, she felt weary to say the least. But she would have to get far away from this hellish complex before she could rest.

The steel door at the top of the tunnel opened into a familiar hall – Boaz' arena. Lara remembered the mutated abomination, and the memories of the man who had stayed behind to fight it came rushing back to her exhausted mind. He had been her only ally throughout this unfair battle. She burst onto the arena and called out his name.

No reply, apart from her own voice echoing off the dome ceiling.

"Kurtis? Where are you?… Answer me, goddammit!"

The hall was deserted. Boaz' beetle carcass lay at the marble wall, ten metres from the late Cabal member's real corpse – a mosquito-like figure with long, blood-smeared claws. Lara deduced that it had to be human blood. Kurtis' blood.

"Oh no. Oh _hell _no," she muttered and limped towards the middle of the hall. Fresh blood had pooled over the floor in a scarlet oval. Lara stared at the bad omen and felt her hope sink to the bottom of her mind, while despair floated on the surface. She knew she could make it out of the Strahov and continue her life alone, but what would she do afterwards? Or rather, what would she _feel_ afterwards?

She crouched down and picked up a disk from the middle of the blood-pool. The Chirugai blade. The bronze artifact felt much lighter than it looked. She slid her fingers into the five holes and held the disk out before her eyes. That strange, orange glow was still emanating from it.

Suddenly, the razorsharp blades shot out from the disk, almost cutting Lara's face. She stood and felt the weapon vibrate in her grip. It reminded her of the way a trusty dog would sniff the air to find out where its master could have gone.

The disk flew around 180 degrees, pulling Lara with it. She turned to face the broad, dark gateway, from which Boaz had emerged earlier. The blades were retracted. Lara lowered the Chirugai and gave a slight, hopeful smile.

She walked across the arena and through the gateway.

Into the shadows.

* * *

A/N: Well, that's it! The oddly unhappy-yet-somewhat-hopeful ending of AoD, put down into written words. Sadly, Crystal Dynamics probably won't continue the Nephilim plot in TR7, but there are still plenty of great fanfics. I really must recommend "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" by theharshlightofday; probably the ultimate AoD sequel. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading this story as much as I did writing it. Thanks for all the reviews … -E.P.O. 


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